“ ‘Now I will conduct a short excerpt from Ravel’s Bolero,’ the Metropolitan Opera’s future music director announces proudly. It’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin [as] a fourth-grader addressing the talent show at Saint-Isaac-Jogues primary school in Montreal,” writes Mike Silverman in Thursday’s (7/1) Associated Press. “And then, in Susan Froemke’s new documentary, ‘Yannick: An Artist’s Journey,’ the 10-year-old boy launches into an exuberant exhibition of arm-waving to a recording of Ravel’s ferocious masterwork…. Froemke has smartly paired this early moment with a snippet of the mature Nézet-Séguin leading the [Metropolitan Opera] orchestra in the same piece. ‘What’s amazing to me,’ she said, … ‘is if you look at the way he’s moving his arms as a child, it’s almost exactly the way he does it today.’ … The documentary recounts its subject’s rapid rise to the top ranks of conductors: founder of La Chapelle de Montreal, an instrumental and choral group, when he was 21; music director of Montreal’s Orchestre Metropolitain by age 25; principal conductor in Rotterdam in 2008; music director [of the Philadelphia Orchestra] in 2012; and now, at age 46, leading the world’s largest opera house…. ‘Yannick: An Artist’s Journey’ opens in movie theaters nationwide on July 7.”
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