53rd musical season for the Friends of Saint-Guilhem

Concert à la lumière des bougies avec Les Itinérantes, vendredi 11 octobre. DR

La 53e saison musicale fait la part belle au baroque, sans négliger les musiques médiévales et contemporaines. Premier rendez-vous samedi 14 septembre.

The association Les Amis de Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert is launching the 53rd edition of its musical season. A program under the sign of beauty and intimacy, predominantly baroque, with some forays into classical and contemporary music.
Originally founded to save and restore the abbey organ (listed as a historic monument in 1974), it is the oldest classical music festival in the Region. Quality is always there, with the intention of making the place shine.
The first concert, “Chiaroscuro”, on September 14, is a duo of Italian baroque musicians. Soprano Magali Léger, a regular at the festival, and mezzo-soprano Albane Carrère, together with musicians Kseniya Ilicheva on the theorbo and Raphaël Jouan on the cello, make up the ensemble A Mirarvi, which will perform Italian music by the young Handel, Monteverdi, the precursor of baroque music, Vivaldi, Pergolese and the unjustly overlooked Bononcini. Like chiaroscuro in painting, this musical form is based on the duo and its fertile oppositions, where one would be nothing without the other.

The voices marry the stone

Friday, September 27, the ensemble Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien reinterprets Vivaldi with “Le souffle des Saisons”. Led by François Lazarevitch as conductor, recorder and transverse flute, it offers six Vivaldi concertos for flutes and musette (small bagpipes used in court music), inspired by Nicolas Chédeville's adaptation of The Four Seasons for musette. The musicians approach the baroque with eloquence and a naturalness that makes the interpretation familiar, despite new ornamentation, with a joyful energy.
The Toulouse Chamber Orchestra, under the artistic direction of Gilles Colliard, will be present on Friday, October 4 for the great symphonies of Mozart. At the height of his talent, he wrote No. 40 in G minor KV 550, and No. 41 in C major KV 551, known as “Jupiter”. While there is no longer any need to introduce Mozart and his work, the concert will also shed light on a contemporary of the artist, William Herschel, and his Symphony for Strings No. 8 in C minor. The latter is especially famous for having discovered the planet Uranus…
The last concert of the year will take place in a more subdued atmosphere, “between heaven and earth”. Manon Cousin, Pauline Langlois de Swarte and Elodie Pont form “Les Itinérantes”, an a capella vocal trio. By candlelight, they will move around the abbey with a repertoire that spans several centuries, from the medieval music of Hildegard Von Bingen, the baroque of Henry Purcell, to the most contemporary with Ola Gjeilo, Michael McGlynn or Danny Elfman. Their voices will embrace the space of the stone, because singing was at the heart of the medieval liturgy, and the places were built accordingly. The thousand-year-old vaults of Gellone still preserve traces of it.

All concerts take place at 8:30 p.m., in the abbey.
Prices: 26 euros – 21 euros members – 10 euros students, job seekers, minimum social welfare recipients. Free for under-16s. I subscribe to read the rest