Thomas Bangalter’s ballet Mythologies released on Erato
The ballet Mythologies by Thomas Bangalter, co-founder of Daft Punk, was released globally by Erato on 7 April. The new recording features the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine conducted by Romain Dumas, who toured the dance score last year.
Thomas Bangalter's Mythologies, his first composition for orchestra, joined the Boosey and Hawkes catalogue in February and tableaux from the ballet score are now available for concert performance. Erato’s premiere recording of the ballet, released on 7 April, is performed by the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine under the direction of Romain Dumas (Warner Classics 5419745384). This large and lyrical work sees Bangalter reinventing his relationship to composition, following his years performing and recording with the Grammy Award-winning duo Daft Punk (1993-2021).
Bangalter completed Mythologies in 2022 as a collaboration with celebrated choreographer Angelin Preljocaj. The full-evening 90-minute ballet was performed with ten dancers from the Opera National de Bordeaux and ten from the Compagnie Angelin Preljocaj, accompanied by the orchestra of the Opéra National de Bordeaux conducted by Romain Dumas. Following its premiere at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux in July 2022, the production undertook a 37-date tour to Biarritz, Lyon, Antibes, Aix-en-Provence, Rouen, and travelled to the Festival Aperto in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Autumn 2022 saw a sequence of sold-out performances at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris with the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris. The ballet is scheduled for a further run at the Théâtre National de Marseilles between 8 and 11 June this year.
> Buy the new Mythologies recording from our Online Shop
> Watch a trailer of the Mythologies ballet
A BBC interview with Thomas Bangalter noted how “his mother and his aunt were both dancers, and his uncle a dance instructor. So, when France's foremost contemporary choreographer, Angelin Preljocaj, asked him to score a new ballet, the answer was simple: Yes.” Bangalter explained how "this project was a way back to the environment I was presented with when I was very young… My mother passed about 20 years ago and going back to that world is linked to a certain time of my life. So it adds some nostalgia, but at the same time, it was a very new adventure."
In an interview with The New York Times Bangalter commented: “With electronic music, it’s so hard and it takes so much time to infuse emotion in the machines. So, to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”
The New York Times’s Zachary Woolfe describes how “Mythologies revels in the palpably human effects of an acoustic ensemble: the trembling friction of bows on strings; the exhalations of breath into brasses; the grumble of bassoon, with audible clicks of fingers on keys. The ballet is a stylized parade of myths from the distant past, but for Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: ‘After everything, the violin will remain’.”
> Read the full New York Times interview
About Thomas Bangalter
Thomas Bangalter is a French musician, born in 1975 to a dancer mother and a composer father. With Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo he founded the duo Daft Punk (1993-2021). He has been working for 30 years on the relationship between humans and technology. He has collaborated, both within Daft Punk and on a personal basis, with Hofesh Shechter, Spike Jonze, Giorgio Moroder, Michel Gondry, Stevie Wonder, Leiji Matsumoto, Peter Lindbergh, Richard Phillips, Kanye West, Nile Rodgers, Julian Casablancas, Paul Williams, Pharrell Williams, Gonzales, Arcade Fire, Matthieu Chedid, The Weeknd, Disney Studios and Gaspar Noe. He was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 2010. Daft Punk's album Random Access Memories won the Grammy award for Album of the Year in the United States in 2014. He is also a director of photography. He lives and works in Paris.
> View Thomas Bangalter’s Boosey & Hawkes page
> Further information on Work: Mythologies
Drawing: Stéphane Manel
