Patrick Leterme: Lumières

Patrick Leterme (born 1981 in Verviers) studied at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Liège where he obtained First Prizes in Piano, Chamber Music and Harmony as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Accompaniment Piano (Grand Distinction). He continued his studies at the Musikhochschule of Cologne where he completed a Zusatzstudium (Postmaster) in Liedbegleitung (Song Accompaniment) and studied conducting with Ronald Zollman and Robin Engelen (Royal Conservatory of Brussels). In 2016 he co-founded the Candide Symphonic Orchestra, an orchestra dedicated to the repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries. For the PBA of Charleroi, in co-production with the Opéra de Reims, the Opéra Royal de Wallonie and/or Les Folies Lyriques (Montpellier), he is the musical director and co-artistic director of Un Violon sur le Toit (2014-2016) as well as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (2017-2021), a stage adaptation of Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand’s musical film, for which he has created a new orchestration. These shows have toured through a large network of Belgian and French venues. He has also been an active composer of symphonic and chamber music and continues to perform as a collaborative pianist with many singers. Passionate about communication, he works regularly on radio and television for RTBF (Belgium). It is in this context that he has been commenting on the final sessions of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium (CMIREB) since 2014, and in 2018, he created the contemporary chronicle Ce N’est Pas Tout (CNPT) produced by Musiq3 (RTBF) and intended to share the music of modern composers with the widest possible audience, in particular by inviting performers and groups of performers to share and record in the studio a brief score of contemporary music.

About Lumières, a two movement work for orchestra composed in 2021, Leterme has written: “Lumière blanche has the appearance of a fantastic scherzo, all in effervescence in its dispersion of timbres through a frantic orchestra. Lumière noire, on the other hand, is bathed in an obsessive gravity that only comes to life during a brief explosive episode, with the mystery taking over for the conclusion.”