The exceptional pianist and conductor Christian Zacharias has been the artistic director and principal conductor of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra (OCL) since 2000. He will be sixty in 2010 and the Fondation de l’Hermitage is joining tributes paid to him on this special occasion by entrusting its galleries to the great musician for several weeks.

With a passion for modern art from 1940 to today, the maestro has assembled a very personal collection where Paul Klee, Louis Soutter and René Auberjonois rub shoulders with Antoni Tŕpies, Louise Bourgeois, Roman Opalka or Miriam Cahn : “The artists who interest me most have created a world of their own with their unusual, intimate vision – they are individualists who cannot be labelled as belonging to a particular school and trend”. His enthusiasm for the plastic arts has led Zacharias to join a number of exhibition projects. It was notably on his initiative that in summer 2001 the Ancien Pénitentier Museum in Sion presented an exhibition on Practice and Rehearsal - accompanied by a musical programme exploring the same theme - the essential stimulus of creation.

Presenting some fifty works from Christian Zacharias’s collection, this event occupy the ground and first floors of the Fondation, while a series of films about the musician will be shown upstairs in the loft. The artist will give a ‘musical’ talk during the course of the exhibition.