Pascal PONS

Percussionist - Conductor - Percussion teacher 

Born in Nice, France, Pascal Pons is a percussionist who specialises in contemporary music. He met and worked under the direction of numerous composers such as Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Elliott Carter or Luigi Nono, then with Salvatore Sciarrino, Helmut Lachenmann and Steve Reich.

As a specialist in the contemporary repertoire, he has premiered numerous concertos for percussion and orchestra - Hans Ulrich Lehmann, Alan Hilario, Nikolaus Brass, Johannes Schöllhorn, Orm Finnendahl.

He has given numerous recitals and chamber music concerts in Europe (France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Norway), the United States, South America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador) and Asia (Mongolia, Vietnam, Burma, Taiwan, Japan).

Pascal Pons performed with the Ensemble Modern the Klangforum. He has performed in renowned concert halls and festivals such as the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican Centre in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Philharmonic Halls of Berlin and Cologne, the Lincoln Center in New York, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Taipei Concert Hall, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Salzburg Festival, the Perth Music Festival, the Munich Biennale, the Zurich Festival, the Wien Modern, the MaerzMusik in Berlin, Harvard-USA under conductors as George Benjamin, Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Heinz Holliger, Zoltan Kocsis, Kent Nagano and Peter Rundel.

Since 2018 he has been conducting the youth orchestra of St. Georgen-Furtwangen in the ensemble of the Institute for Contemporary Music of the "Hochschule für Musik" in Freiburg.

Pascal Pons teach Percussion at the University of Music in Lucerne in Switzerland. He taught marimba and vibraphone at the Musikhochschule of Freiburg, at the Conservatoire Neuchâtelois (Switzerland) and at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Versailles.