FACES TO WATCH 2009 MUSIC

YANNICK NEZET-SEGUIN

AN IMPRESSIVE CANADIAN

On a weekend in mid-March, Martha Argerich is supposed to play Ravel’s Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and that is all most ticket buyers need to know to mob the box office. The conductor could be Joe Blow.

In fact, the conductor has a much more difficult name. A 33-year-old French Canadian who is music director of the Orchestre Metropolitain du Grand Montreal (not to be confused with the far more famous Montreal Symphony, which Kent Nagano heads), Yannick Nezet-Seguin appears to be unusually ambitious and has managed to build an impressive discography of audiophile recordings with his second-rank band. A very slow, very grand Bruckner Ninth is just out that may be a bit too ambitious.

But Europe in particular is taking note. In the Netherlands, Nezet-Seguin has just been appointed music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, succeeding no less than Valery Gergiev. In L.A., he will be able to show his stuff with Shostakovich’s flashy Fifth Symphony.

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DANIELLE DE NIESE

ALLURE IS THIS SOPRANO’S LURE

The hot young soprano isn’t exactly the newest kid on the block. Born in Australia to Sri Lankan parents, Danielle de Niese grew up in Los Angeles. As a teenager, she won an Emmy for a television program on the arts that she hosted for young people. In 2001, she appeared in the L.A. Opera production of Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi.”

Her recital at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on Feb. 10, however, will be her first time back as an opera star. And you can forget all the innocent teenage stuff right now. De Niese’s fame has been, at least to some extent, as a femme fatale.

She drew wide attention for her perkily alluring Cleopatra in a production of Handel’s “Julius Caesar” at England’s Glyndebourne Festival in 2005 and returned there last summer as the sexy lead in Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea.” Next month, she will star in the Mark Morris production of Gluck’s “Orfeo and Euridice” at the Metropolitan Opera, and it will hit movie theaters in an HD broadcast on Jan. 24.

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NICO MUHLY

COMPOSER OUT OF THE WOODS

One composer under 30 stands out among his generation. Nico Muhly has long stopped emerging and has fully emerged. His work knows no boundaries. English Renaissance choral music is a passion from his days as a schoolboy chorister growing up in Vermont. Philip Glass employs him. He’s worked on Bjork and Rufus Wainwright albums. The score for the recent film “The Reader” is his. The New Yorker magazine has already given him a full profile.

But although a regular in New York’s new music circles, Muhly has had little exposure in Los Angeles, unless you count his arrangements for Antony and the Johnsons when the band appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Walt Disney Concert Hall last fall. So leave it to Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale to help begin filling in the Muhly gap.

On Feb. 22 in Disney, the chorus will offer the West Coast premiere of Muhly’s “Expecting the Main Things From You.” These settings of three poems by Walt Whitman are for chorus, string quartet, percussion and organ. At one point, the chorus sings a kind of Morse code inspired by the composer’s experiences watching satellites pass over the Vermont woods.