L’Offrande Musicale: 'A challenge from music and the disabled towards society’

‘A festival outside of the norm’. If I had a penny for every time I’d read a pronouncement to that effect from a classical music festival. Yet, when I first scanned the website of France’s brand new L’Offrande Musicale festival in the Haute-Pyrénées, which uses that phrase as its maxim, I genuinely did a double-take. Free entry to all concerts for any disabled person, plus one companion. Each concert venue able to accommodate as many wheelchair users as wish to attend. Free access to dress rehearsals for anyone unable to sit through a full-length formal concert. Two concerts filmed for streaming into care homes. All wrapped up in a varied, major league programme including Emmanuelle Haïm directing Le Concert d’Astrée in Handel’s Water Music to a video installation by Antoine Wagner; Riccardo Muti conducting Mozart and Verdi with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra and Choir, the Cremona Antiqua choir and singers from Ukrainian National Opera, plus festival founder and artistic director David Fray (pictured below) partnering with baritone Benjamin Appl and cellist Edgar Moreau for Schubert.

David Fray ©Paolo Roversi - Erato​

Could this really be true? Well yes, as I discovered one early-July evening when I turned up at Lourdes’ Cité Sainte-Pierre to hear violinist Renaud Capuçon with the Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse, because what was instantly striking was the number of vehicles pulling up to deposit wheelchair-users. They then had a significant proportion of the hall’s front space seating area dedicated to them, and among the able-bodied concertgoers were people with cognitive disabilities. Equally noteworthy was the fact that the 939-seater hall (slightly less with wheelchairs) was full. Indeed, sell-out concerts have been the norm, despite this being only the second year of a festival hosted by a non-affluent region sitting some way off the grid of most cultural pilgrims, amid a general post-Covid context in which Europe’s most illustrious concert halls are regularly still only managing to fill two thirds of their seats.

While people usually travel to this area in search of medical miracles, this cultural phenomenon is thanks to the work of the festival’s locally born and bred founder and artistic director, pianist David Fray. He moved back to the area around eight years ago. ‘After 15 years in Paris, I rediscovered my own territory, noticed some beautiful venues, and thought it was time to do something for my region,’ he recounts later that week in a Tarbes cafe, just before heading off to rehearse Ghost Light, John Neumeier’s solo-piano-accompanied Covid creation for Hamburg Ballet, which had now been specially re-imagined for a colossal temporary stage in the town’s covered market, Halle Marcadieu. ‘But it was also very clear to me that I didn’t want to make just another festival’. Hence the birth of a festival like no other – open and attractive to traditional audiences, but created around and for people living with disabilities. ‘The goal’, he sums up, ‘was to put the spotlight on people that generally are hidden from society, and on a subject that in general people try to avoid, by creating something that everybody would like to be in. “Offrande” means gift. Bach’s Offrande Musicale was also a challenge set to him by the king. So this festival is a challenge from music and the disabled towards society.’

Also a challenge couched in dignity. ‘Financially speaking, I wanted right from the beginning for this not to be a “charity” festival,’ he emphasises. ‘All the artists are paid. I didn’t want to say, “You are a great artist, but here you will come for free because there will be disabled people”. Because what does that mean? It’s because of such attitudes that charity things for disabled people are often poor quality, it would make it impossible to create a highest-level festival each year, and philosophically I didn’t want disabled concertgoers to be in front of people who were playing for free, “Because it’s for you”’.

Inevitably, financing such a set of guiding principles was going to be the first and largest hurdle. However, the festival’s very distinctiveness and societal value meant that a private sponsor in fact appeared with semi-miraculous speed, following a chance meeting at a dinner. Convincing the local authorities was then relatively smooth. ‘They knew I had this private support and perhaps trusted me because of that. They found the idea good. I’m from here, which helps. And while there are cultural offerings in the region, it’s not overcrowded’. Next came the meetings with the various associations, such as APF France handicap, who would be transporting people to the concerts, or presenting screenings in care homes.

The task of making it all happen began with awareness of the various issues at play. ‘In general, people with a disabled family member assume it will be too complicated, so they don’t even attempt it’ he outlines. ‘They effectively bar themselves, simply because they are deeply tired of always asking and not being sure, or due to past disappointments – because sometimes organisers might say, “Yes, it’s okay,” and then you arrive to find stairs… So I tried to understand what needed to and could be done’.

For motor disabilities, this meant focussing on venues. ‘A lot of theatres have spots for three, four, maybe ten wheelchairs, let’s say, but no more’ he begins. ‘Whereas the advantage of these beautiful venues [including Chateau Montus, the Abbaye de la Escaladieu, and the esplanade of the Lourdes Rosary Basilica itself] is that they are not concert halls with fixed chairs, and we do our own seating map. So if I want to put 30 wheelchairs in then I can; and I always check that everything is ground floor, with no stairs’. For cognitive disabilities meanwhile, ‘We had the idea to open the dress rehearsals for people who are not able to sit quietly for two hours for a concert, because just because they perhaps move, talk, shout or whatever, it doesn’t mean that they don’t like the music and don’t deserve to be put in front of musicians. As we saw with Covid, music is a living art, about connecting people directly. Streaming is only good when you can’t do anything else. And carers have sometimes been surprised to discover that someone was able to do much more than expected, staying the entire time and not wanting to leave.’

Between 600 and 700 disabled people consequently attended this year. Then for those who really can’t attend the festival has, as well as facilitating concert screenings, been sending a musical therapist and physiotherapist together into schools and centres for the disabled. The results of this have been so powerful, with yet more people surprising nurses with their newfound capabilities, that this work is now continuing outside the festival period.

There are further festival offerings, too: Fray gives public masterclasses to a multinational complement of young piano talents in the church of his own village, attended by a substantial local audience, many of whom are new to classical concerts; a festival brochure containing a new short story written for the festival by journalist Philip Lançon who was seriously injured in the Charlie Hebdo office shooting, and an interview with another festival special guest, actor and director Dominic Farrugia, who happens to be in a wheelchair. All concerts are prefaced by talks, and followed by gastronomic dinners (which, at €55 per ticket, are actually within the reach of those on non-supersized salaries).

Asked what further advice he’d give to anyone wishing to do something similar, ‘Always anticipate what could go wrong’ Fray counsels. ‘Also be well-surrounded. Not automatically with music or festival professionals, either – just people who are intelligent and who really want to do it for good reasons. I am surrounded by incredible volunteers. They are always trying to find solutions, and in general they succeed. Nobody in this festival is doing it for ego. The star of this festival is the festival.’

On to the future, and Fray would like to integrate disability and the disabled into what’s happening onstage as well as in the audience. Also to bring in more disabled people from outside the region; and overall to really double down on communication, ‘Because even if we say, “It’s free for you and one other person,” people somehow don’t believe it. We’re receiving telephone calls asking, “But is it really for me?”’

Most of all, though, it’s about creating a genuinely diverse society rather than merely a fashionably diverse one. ‘In a world in which, more and more, minorities are trying to exist, the disabled minority still doesn’t,’ points out Fray. ‘But these people won’t take to the streets. They are the invisible, non-protesting minority, and I think it’s time to change. These people are already fighting against their own diseases all day long, but more than this weight inside them is the weight of how society looks on them, when we should be making their life easier, not more difficult’. He concludes, ‘So we are militant, but in a noble way, I hope. To create a society where people are aware, open and welcoming.’

You can find out more about L’Offrande Musicale here.