Le Festival de Marvão, royaume de la musique et des musiciens
Image Credit above © FIMM – Paulo Gouveia / Estela Álvarez Ruiz
Translated article by Alain Lompech, on bachtrack.fr
The citadel that the Moors built in Marvão is surrounded by an unbroken wall atop a rock that dominates the Alentejo. On a clear day, one can see the sea, 200 kilometers to the west towards Lisbon. Inside, white houses with granite-framed windows line small parallel streets, connected by transverse stairways. All around, a lush countryside stretches, with cork oaks, chestnut trees, and vineyards. A wine is produced here from twenty-two red and white grape varieties, which serves as an allegory for a festival celebrating its eleventh edition this year. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: conductor and violinist Christoph Poppen and his wife, soprano Juliane Banse, created it after discovering the breathtaking beauty of this place at the end of a long bike ride. They bought a small house here and founded a festival.
“This is a major act of cultural resistance.”
These two musicians gather other musicians from various places, both seasoned and emerging, for an intense “week of Nantes” in miniature. This is a festival, not just a series of summer concerts: it makes you travel through the citadel and even beyond, to reach a church at its foot and then climb back up to the castle that overlooks it, like following a procession—together and rather joyfully.
The program caters both to the curious music lover spending a vacation in the area and to a less experienced audience. One moment, there is a concert dedicated to the Boulanger sisters, another focuses on Ravel, Debussy, Franck, Prokofiev, Chausson, or Franck again, often blending instrumental and vocal music, with both rarely performed and more famous pieces. One might also attend a Schubert mass during Sunday morning service or a clarinet fado concert held in an old water cistern. The festival also features evenings of Wolfgang Rihm, jazz, Messiaen, Schönberg, Webern, Luís Tinoco—a Portuguese composer born in the late 1960s—children’s concerts, and many more events, sometimes four in a single day, all followed by a silent, attentive audience.
After three days, one leaves intoxicated by music, gazing at the horizon with irony: music has never been in such good health.
One highlight was a morning concert outside the walls, in the Church of São Tiago, which is easier to reach than to leave due to the steep incline. A simple and beautiful church from 1698, according to a granite inscription, with choir paintings that look like sugar decorations. Pedro Teixeira’s Officium Ensemble performed previously unknown works preserved at the Cathedral of Évora by 16th- and 17th-century Portuguese composers, “unknown” to music dictionaries. These short pieces, from masses or standalone, were sung exquisitely, respecting musicological standards while showcasing vocal sensitivity, perfection, and intonation that make them lovable on first hearing. Due to the audience turnout, the 4 p.m. concert was repeated, focusing on Maurice Ravel. Spanish baritone Unai De la Rosa Hernández, 24, a student of Juliane Banse, sang Don Quixote to Dulcinea and some Histoires naturelles with a clear, well-timbered voice, free of imitation and accent, with perfect characterization and humor, even in his stage movements.
Earlier, the Malion Quartet performed a splendid Ravel Quartet with broad, supple phrases, impeccably led. The concert concluded with a remarkable performance of the rare Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet, led by Christoph Poppen on violin with young violist Nicolas Garrigues and cellist Aurélien Pascal, whose style increasingly recalls the imperial Pierre Fournier.
An hour and a half later, the audience moved to the open courtyard of the citadel, where one could pause for a drink while enjoying the breathtaking panorama from a café terrace or around small wooden stalls between the houses and fortress, on a large esplanade suspended between sky and earth. With orange blankets kindly offered to each spectator by the festival, about five hundred people gathered to hear Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio, the Souvenir de Florence Sextet, and the String Quartet No. 3. The trio left a lasting impression. Samson Tsoy, responding to the two bows, played alongside the young and astonishing Kevin Zhu on violin (trained by Itzhak Perlman) and Bruno Philippe on cello, captivating the audience with their seamless exchanges and expressive playing.
On Sunday, the audience returned to the Church of São Tiago for a recital by Christoph Prégardien and his son Julian, presenting a selection of lieder and duets by Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Schubert, accompanied with subtle artistry by Silke Avenhaus. In Marvão, lieder and art songs hold a prominent place, even when they are absent from other concert programs; they feature in many performances, including those of Debussy, Schönberg, Prokofiev, Mozart, Chausson, Webern, Richard Strauss, and even Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer performed by young singers.
After three days, one leaves intoxicated by music, gazing at the horizon with irony: music has never been in such good health; never have there been so many highly trained young chamber musicians who are also top-level soloists; never have nationalities mixed so well; never have there been so many leading string quartets—and yet the international press devotes so little space to this phenomenon that the Marvão International Music Festival captures as if it were natural, while it is truly a major act of cultural resistance.
The festival runs until July 27. If your steps lead you to the Alentejo, be sure to climb up: the music is beautiful, the air is pure, the wine is delightful, and the cuisine at the tiny O Fago restaurant is sublime and refined.
Alain Lompech, born in 1954, was a music critic and journalist at Le Monde de la Musique and then at Le Monde, where he headed the “Art and Shows” pages and served as assistant director and program chief at France Musique. He regularly writes music reviews for Diapason and published the first volume of Great Pianists of the 20th Century.
CHRISTOPH POPPEN
CONDUCTOR