Fête de la musique

Over the course of eleven days in August 2020, the French town of Rocamadour hosted the fifteenth edition of Festival de Rocamadour, a music festival dedicated to sacred music from the classical, baroque, and romantic periods. On August 26, the French violinist Renaud Capuçon and his compatriot pianist Guillaume Bellom performed an intimate concert at the atmospheric, medieval Basilique Saint-Sauveur. On the program are Gabriel Fauré's Sonata No. 1, Opus 13 (1876), and César Franck's Sonata for violin and piano (1886).

French composer Guillaume Connesson (1970) is building an impressive musical oeuvre, to which he has recently added an opera: 'Les bains macabres'. For this romantic contemporary thriller opera he worked closely with librettist Olivier Bleys (1970), a successful French author with dozens of novels to his credit. The result is an enigmatic narrative with a film noir soundtrack about the macabre 'Bains Terminus': ailing patrons who come to take the waters here never leave. When the Pool police investigates their mysterious deaths, the realms of life and death turn out to be not as separate as expected… In this February 2020 production, directed by Florent Siaud, soprano Sandrine Buendia plays the part of Célia and baritone Romain Dayez plays Mathéo. Conductor Arie van Beek conducts the Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes.

On the occasion of Claude Debussy's 150th anniversary, Jean-Claude Casadesus conducts the Orchestre National de Lille and choir of the Opéra de Lille in a concert fully dedicated to the French impressionistic composer. On the program are three of his most beloved works for orchestra. The concert opens with Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, a symphonic poem based on the eponymous poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. It is one of the composer's most famous works and considered a turning point in the history of music. The program continues with music from Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande in an orchestral arrangement by Marius Constant. The concert closes with a rendition La Mer, a work composed of the three symphonic sketches.

Toulouse-based Ballet du Capitole performs Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's famous ballet The Nutcracker in a choreography by Kader Belarbi. The Nutcracker, an 1892 ballet in two acts which was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, is based on E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'. This performance was recorded at Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, France on December 28, 2018.