The Phoenix group, during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, at the Stade de France, in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis), August 11, 2024. SARAH MEYSSONNIER/REUTERS
After the stroll along the Seine for the opening ceremony, music returned to its home – at least when it came to the biggest domestic or international stars – for the closing ceremony, with the Stade de France in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) as the setting. This time, there was no star of the caliber of Quebec’s Céline Dion, who sang again on Friday, July 26 for the first time since 2020 in public, paying tribute to Edith Piaf with Hymn to love.
Relive the live Closing Ceremony: The flame is extinguished in Paris; the Olympic Games are over and the Paralympics will follow
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There, it’s the young one (24 years old) Zaho de Sagazan – on the rise since the triumph of his first album in February, The Symphony of Lightningat the Victoires de la Musique – that the responsibility of perpetuating the heritage of French song fell to her. She did this simply and convincingly in front of the Olympic cauldron in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, the starting point of the flame, naturally joining forces with Jean-Christophe Spinosi’s Ensemble Matheus and the choir of the Handel-Hendrix Academy.
Their lively rereading of Under the Parisian skyone of the most famous hymns to the capital since its appearance in the film of the same name directed by Julien Duvivier in 1951 (before also being interpreted by Edith Piaf), was the only slightly surprising moment of an evening where we mainly heard the music of the two accomplices of the director Thomas Jolly, Victor Le Masne and Clément Mirguet.
Read the interview with the composer Victor Le Masne: Article reserved for our subscribers “The rain was a key character in the ceremony”
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The first has as an asset a great versatility of styles which unfortunately makes his own perfectly impersonal. This was heard from his arrangement of a Marseillaise sung by the choir of Fontainebleau (Seine-et-Marne), deliberately cut off from any momentum and drive. His original production for this ceremony, under the baton of Zahia Ziouani conducting her orchestra Divertimento, oscillates between neo-disco and old-fashioned variety show credits. As for Clément Mirguet, his creation for the futuristic tableau “Records” is similar to what can be heard as an accompaniment to video games, despite the use of ondes Martenot and a zurna, the Ottoman oboe.
Singer Zaho de Sagazan performs “Sous le ciel de Paris” for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, in the Tuileries Gardens, in Paris, on August 11, 2024. VADIM GHIRDA/AP
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After theHymn of Apolloone of the two musical compositions of ancient Greece dedicated to the god and discovered in 1893 in Delphi, sung by the Franco-Swiss tenor Benjamin Bernheim, time stretched out for a French touch sequence. With the group Phoenix for its repertoire or accompanying its friends from Air sur Playground Lovesong from the soundtrack of Virgin Suicides (1999), the film by Sofia Coppola. This was in fact just a replica of the concert that the two groups gave on Wednesday July 17 on the roof of Terminal 1 of Paris Charles-de-Gaulle airport.
