Festival de Pâques: 'A notion of solidarity and morale'

How do you grow a festival from an already large scale? That was the theme I explored back in 2016 when, for this magazine, I first reported on Aix-en-Provence’s Eastertide Festival de Pâques, a festival which at that point was just three years old, but which right from the beginning had boasted a generous two-week programme crammed with major international orchestras and soloists arranged around the centrepiece of a big-name Passion performance. These were accompanied by a meaningful young artist strand and strong local outreach; all thanks to the combined vision, contact books and programming nous of its two directors, violinist Renaud Capuçon and theatre director Dominique Bluzet.

The answer to that question in 2016 was about originality and innovation, from inviting artists largely unknown to European audiences, to commissioning a string quartet of instruments from renowned Paris luthier Pierre Barthel to gift to four students at the city’s music conservatory. Fast forward to 2022, and what most struck me about this first live festival in three years (the pandemic necessitated an online-only 2021 offering and caused the cancellation of the 2020 edition entirely), was not so much the ambitious scale and usual elements which had returned as though nothing had ever happened, but a special programming focus that should give other major festivals pause for thought. While the visiting soloists were as international a bunch as ever, including the likes of soprano-conductor Barbara Hannigan and pianist Nelson Goerner, the orchestral programming was for the first time both entirely French-focussed, and encompassing every possible size and profile: from the internationally-known Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Insula Orchestra to regional ensembles the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice, Orchestre National d’Auvergne (pictured) and Orchestre National de Pays de la Loire; plus baroque ensembles Café Zimmermann and Ensemble Matheus, and non-French, French-speaking orchestras the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo.

‘It’s very easy to be an international festival, to be excited about welcoming great overseas orchestras, but to almost overlook others that are based just an hour away’, points out Capuçon. ‘So I had always wanted to do a focus on French orchestras, and in previous years we have always programmed at least one. So after two years of trauma, and with this year needing to be about rejoicing, to do so with French orchestras felt very natural; and of course we were planning the festival in February last year when everything was still a complete disaster, so it was also a way to guard against cancellations’.

There was significant method to the choosing too, as Bluzet explains. ‘With the Orchestre National d’Auvergne it was to give them some visibility, to show that the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region isn’t just home to the Orchestre National de Lyon’ he outlines. ‘Furthermore, its conductor, Thomas Zehetmair, is interesting to us because Renaud is a violinist who also wants to conduct, and Zehetmair has preceded him in that’. He continues, ‘The Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice, meanwhile, was important not only because it’s a symphony orchestra you don’t usually hear – because it’s a pit orchestra at l’Opéra de Nice – but also because it’s the same region as us’.

As for the danger of a slightly lower artistic level when swapping out international level for regional, Bluzet analogises, ‘Have you ever bought a fake Hermès bag? There’s not much of a difference to the real thing. So of course, there will be the two percent of the population who can tell the difference between the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the Orchestre de Monte Carlo, and perhaps a few more with the Orchestre d’Auverge. But in a very centralised country like France, if you don’t give that chance to the region, it’s like saying that nothing exists but Paris, and one needs to be a bit militant and political on that. In Germany, by contrast, it’s a question that doesn’t even come up. In England it comes up a bit.’

As for my own on-the-ground experience, Bluzet’s thinking felt pretty spot on as I sat through the Orchestre d’Auverge’s Bach, Xenakis and Brahms, in that on a musical level it felt like more of a mixed bag than usual for a Festival de Pâques concert, and there were a few newly empty seats following the interval; yet at the concert’s best, the Hermès bag analogy held true, and it was undeniably interesting and worthwhile to be given a rare musical snapshot of another part of France’s musical landscape – a view the French critics generally appeared to share.

My visit also coincided with one of the most anticipated concerts taking the festival out into the wider region: Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time performed by Capuçon, cellist Kian Soltani, pianist Hélène Mercier and clarinettist Pascal Moraguès at Camp des Milles (pictured below), a Second World War internment camp on the Aix-en-Provence outskirts which had first held foreign nationals – many of them German artists and intellectuals who had fled the Nazi regime – and then later Jews being transported to concentration camps. Here, the combination of venue and music, powerfully performed as a new war unfolded in Ukraine, made for a night that will linger in the memory for the foreseeable. Plus, while Moraguès was a last-minute replacement for Andreas Ottensamer, he had actually worked on the piece with Messiaen himself, and produced some of the most hauntingly beautiful moments of all.

©D.R Fondation du Camp des Milles-Mémoire et Education

Back to Bluzet. ‘A festival that’s just a list of shows is of no interest to me’, he states. ‘I wanted the concert at Camp des Milles because it was meaningful to do that piece in that place; and while when I suggested it, we didn’t know there would be Ukraine, it’s important at the moment to say that there are musicians who are battling in their countries for the right to exist, and for a festival like us to give them visibility. There’s nothing worse for an artist than to be told that they don’t exist, and even more than you don’t exist in your own country. So we didn’t initially book Moraguès because we had looked for a more international name, but this was an example of how we need to trust the playing history rather than the notoriety. And of course, there are different levels of orchestra, but if you take the Orchestre d’Auvergne, this has for years been going out into territory where the audiences it’s been engaging with haven’t been longstanding, established ones. So we’re standing before militant musicians, and for me it’s very important to pay homage such people’.

Hardly a surprise, therefore, that as the festival looks ahead to its tenth anniversary next year, there’s a desire to programme more like two or three French orchestras annually, complimenting the international ones. As Bluzet concludes, ‘It’s necessary to give a new epoch even more meaning to things. More of a notion of solidarity and morale. The music world can’t be a hangout for the rich because it’s meaning will die’. Or, in other words, the Festival de Pâques has grown again.

You can find out more about the Festival de Pâques here.