For once, the Festival will this year be “colourful” in Italy and utopian in order to echo the 500th anniversary of the monument and the exhibition that will be on display at the time of the Festival: Italian composers and references to Italy will thus meet modern and contemporary utopias, with a special focus on youth and some projects off the beaten track. An exceptional year, an exceptional program!
This 9th edition of the Chambord Festival, in this year when we are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the construction of the castle, had to adopt a particular colouring. Echoing the major exhibition “Chambord, 1519-2019: Utopia at Work”, presented during the Festival on the second floor of the château, the programme thus honours Italy, home of the genius Leonardo, so decisive for the French Renaissance, and the utopia “invented” by Thomas More in 1516, which forms part of the intellectual context of the first 16th century, in the form of ideal cities and humanism, and whose posterity continues to the present day. Nevertheless, in 2019, as in previous editions, it was not more a question of restricting the proposed programme to the Renaissance, but always of placing it in a diachrony, like the castle itself, in order to celebrate these 500 years of the ancient repertoire up to contemporary music. Spectators will thus be able to sail, “with jumps and leaps” as Montaigne called it, between Leonardo’s Italy, then that of the great baroque composers (Monteverdi and Scarlatti) opening towards the classics (Vivaldi), the great repertoire (Puccini) and up to the contemporary (Gregoretti), on a breathtaking journey through five centuries of Italian music! Utopia, for its part, will be represented by an exceptional work by Berlioz, imagining, with Euphonia 2344, a musical utopian city that is going wrong, but also with singular projects, affirming today the durability and relevance of this thought: whether it is that of S. Groud and V.Wagner combining music and dance, professionals and amateurs, virtuoso and unskilled bodies; Cairn’s or the Ausonia ensemble’s, which brings together English baroque music and contemporary rewriting, or Bach and the theatre Nō; Finally, that of Jordi Savall exalting friendship between peoples, or the simple presence of young performers representing the very future of music… However, this double theme was not intended to be exclusive, and we will also enjoy hearing French music, Chopin or a “Schubertiade” because, for his birthday, we refuse ourselves nothing!
