Reintroducing Musique Cordiale to France in 2023
It’s time to reintroduce the Musique Cordiale to our loyal supporters in Provence. We are ready to welcome back our French and wider European audiences and to invite new appreciators of high-calibre music, whether they are seasonal visitors or local residents of the picturesque corner of SE France.
The International Festival is back this summer for its 19th edition, 3 – 12 August 2023, after exile to Kent in England for the 3 pandemic years. Take a look at the programme and at our revitalised website, where you can see this year’s inviting and varied musical programme of concerts in each village of the Pays de Fayence. They begin on 3 August in the recently-restored chapel Saint-Donat, nestled in the woods but with views up towards the hill towns of Callian and Montauroux, and end in a crowning choral and instrumental finale in Seillans on 12 August. There will be 8 free lunch-time concerts and 10 evening concerts, for which tickets are now available from our online Box Office. And there’s an invitation too to our popular convivial pre-festival Soirée Musicale (with delicious food and wine), which returns to Seillans on 26 July.
There are chamber-music concerts, as well as instrumental and vocal recitals, in the acoustic medieval chapels of the lovely medieval “villages perchés” that adorn the Pays de Fayence. Enjoy such music too in Saint-Paul-en-Forêt and Mons while larger Churches in Callian, Bagnols-en-Forêt, Tourrettes and Seillans provide venues in the refreshing cool of the evenings, for orchestral and choral works. Mozart, Handel, Vivaldi, Piazzola, Haydn, Britten, Polenc, Beethoven and more….
A serene vineyard and, once again, the romantic Place Valat below the chateau de Seillans provide a perfect ambience on summer evenings for sprinkings of opera, jazz, folk and world music. In the Amphithetre Verdure in Fayence, there will be a unique bringing-together of contrasting ancient and modern high-tempo versions of the ‘Four Seasons’ performed by 2 virtuoso violinists as the sun sets over the surrounding hills of the Var. There is even a peaceful indoor concert for a warm lunchtime beside Tanneron’s Lac Saint-Cassien.
We are thrilled to bring the festival back to Provence this summer. But we never stopped completely. The festival series continued, scaled down but uninterrupted, since 2005. The choir sang, our musiciens played. We even staged a concert (in England) to celebrate 70 years of the late Queen Elizabeth. The pandemic brought us new audiences in England. We are sorry not to be able to offer them concerts this summer but there will be a Musical weekend in Kent in November to look forward to – featuring a reprise of highlights from the summer festival in France. These include some of the glorious 18th century Baroque and Classical coronation music that you can hear in our final concerts in France this summer.
Do come and join us!
www.musique-cordiale.com
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