EUROPEAN STOPOVERS FOR THE ACADEMIE’S RESIDENCY

Initiated last July at the Académie du Festival d’Aix, the residency The art of recital continues to resonate at the member institutions of enoa, the European network of opera academies piloted by the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

Drawing on their experience gained at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in the summer of 2018 with the baritone Stéphane Degout and the pianist Alain Planès, the six constituted duos were invited to pursue their musical, poetic and aesthetic explorations by honouring the repertoire of the French melody. The young artists therefore took part in a cycle of workshops at the heart of the member institutions of enoa directed by Stéphane Degout. The baritone can lay claim to a long familiarity with the repertoire of the French melody and with the form of the recital. He lavished his advice and expertise on all the singers and pianists with the talent, the finesse and the generosity that he is renowned for in order to conceive and to work on a recital programme, and to present it in a concert format at the end of the workshop. The duos thus had the opportunity to perform in the halls which are partners of enoa.

Acting as an international sounding board, enoa enables mobility for the young talents, leveraging energies throughout Europe. After l’Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid in October then La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels last month, the final stopover were this weekend at Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh, Suffolk in the United Kingdom.

An attentive and warm audience [at La Monnaie]: a great joy to play this programme to a full house and to reap the rewards of our work in Aix in July.

Florent Mourier

As part of Aix en juin, the prelude to the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, you will be able to hear next 18 June in the courtyard of the Hôtel Maynier d’Oppède the duo Nitescence, made up of the soprano Marie-Laure Garnier and the pianist Célia Oneto-Bensaid, both nominated HSBC Laureates of the Académie du Festival d’Aix in 2018. For the occasion, they will present a programme based on cabaret songs from the inter-war years, from Vienna to Paris by way of Broadway with works of Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Alexander Zemlinsky, Francis Poulenc, Cole Porter.

It is really pleasant and profitable for us to have as much working time with Stéphane Degout. Throughout the concerts, it was a rich experience to be in front of a non-francophone foreign public.

Marie-Laure Garnier

This workshops cycle is part of the Young Opera Makers programme of enoa (European Network of Operas Academies) and benefit of the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.