Le Balcon

The ensemble Le Balcon was founded in 2008 by six students from the Paris Conservatoire and brings together an ensemble of instrumentalists and singers trained in various styles. Le Balcon adapts for its individual projects and concerts in terms of its number of members, visual concept and scenography, and interaction with sound design or electronic music. The ensemble is named after the 1956 play Le Balcon by Jean Genet, and — like the playwright Genet himself — focuses its artistic and musical efforts on narrative, speech and performance.

The group was initially located at the Église Saint-Merry, followed by the Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet, and gradually became a transdisciplinary collective — an orchestra, a group of singers, composers, video artists, dancers and directors, as well as a record label and music publisher.

Le Balcon creates productions from a repertory spanning all eras of music history, with a particular focus on works from the 20th and 21st centuries. In its seven years at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, Le Balcon produced several operas and plays, including Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Eötvös’s Le Balcon, Lévinas’s La Métamorphose, and Rihm’s Jakob Lenz, along with many world premieres.

In 2018 Le Balcon began to turn to larger forms, including, perhaps most importantly, a production of LICHT, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s cycle of seven operas. DONNERSTAG aus LICHT had its premiere at the Opéra Comique in 2018 and was revived at London’s Southbank Centre. This was followed by SAMSTAG aus LICHT in 2019, DIENSTAG in 2020 as part of the Festival d’Automne at the Philharmonie, and SONNTAG in 2023.

In the 2024/25 season Le Balcon performed part of Montag at the Opéra de Lille and appeared at the Festival de Saint-Denis and at Bozar in Brussels. This summer the ensemble returns to the Salzburg Festival and appears at the Festival Berlioz. In November 2025 Le Balcon will perform the whole of MONTAG at the Festival d’Automne, with MITTWOCH following in 2026.

In 2021, Le Balcon made its Salzburg Festival debut with Stockhausen’s Inori, returning in 2022 to perform Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz.

2025 releases include the Howard Shore album Anthology — The Paris Concerts, Sivan Eldar’s opera Like Flesh and live recordings of Stockhausen’s Sonntag and Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti under Maxime Pascal.

Since 2018 the ensemble has worked with composers in residence funded by the Singer-Polignac Foundation to create new works. Among other things, the residencies have led to a robot orchestra project as part of the Festival de Saint-Denis and the premiere of a new opera by Arthur Lavandier at the Opéra de Lille.

Le Balcon is supported by the Ministère de la Culture, the Société Générale Foundation C’est Vous l’Avenir, the Île-de-France Region, the City of Paris, the Singer-Polignac Foundation, the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique and La Copie Privée.