Jean-Pascal Beintus

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Jean-Pascal Beintus is a French composer. Born in Toulouse, France in 1966, he studied double bass and composition at the conservatories of Nice, Lyon and Paris during the 1980s. When John Eliot Gardiner created the Lyon Opéra Orchestra in 1983, he selected Beintus as a founding double bass player. His first work, Samskara, was for double bass and chamber orchestra.

In 1996 Kent Nagano, then music director of the Opéra de Lyon, recognized Jean-Pascal Beintus' talents as composer and began to commission works from him. Since then, he has written music for nearly every type of ensemble, and for theatre, concert hall and film.

Recent commissions have come from the Berlin Philharmonic ("He's Got Rhythm: Homage to George Gershwin"), the Russian National Orchestra ("Wolf Tracks and Peter and the Wolf"), the Hallé Orchestra ("Couleurs Cuivres"), the Berkeley Symphony ("Berkeley Images", "Luna Tree" and "Bremen Town Musicians"), the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra ("Kobe Symphony", which was featured on David Benoit's 2005 release, Orchestral Stories, on Peak Records), l'Orchestre de Paris ("Cordes et Lames"), the State of California ("Manzanar: An American Story"), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("Nature Suite"), and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin ("Le Petit Prince").

Jean-Pascal Beintus' film work includes the original score of the Leonardo DiCaprio film The 11th Hour, as well as orchestrating Alexandre Desplat’s scores for Syriana and Golden Globe-winning score of The Painted Veil.

A recording of Jean-Pascal Beintus' "Wolf Tracks" featuring Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and Sophia Loren as narrators received a 2004 Grammy Award. Antonio Banderas narrated the Spanish version, released in 2007.