The appointment of Laurent Campellone as director of the Grand-Théâtre Opéra de Tours in September 2020 put an end to the tensions between the musicians of the orchestra and its predecessors. Despite a 1st season under health constraints, the 2nd lyrical and symphonic season confirms the wind of change blowing over the Opéra de Tours.
Unanimously appointed by the jury to succeed Benjamin Pionnier, Laurent Campellone has devoted most of his career to conducting, in France but also abroad. For more than 10 years, he has promoted the French lyrical repertoire with works by Jules Massenet or Charles Gounod as musical director of the Opera and the orchestra of Saint Etienne.
Laurent Campellone has already marked the year 2021 by creating for example “solidarity opera” with in particular a system of “suspended places” -which consists of buying a place to offer it to a stranger-, or even “Zen representations” open especially to people with disabilities presenting behavioral problems (autism, Alzheimer’s disease , and others).
Meeting with this nationally and internationally renowned conductor with very humanistic values.
Parity appears today as a claim and a means of social equality and our lyrical and musical institutions, in France and around the world, have taken up this question for a few years. There were very symbolic actions such as the arrival of the first conductor at the Vienna Philharmonic, the first arrival at the Berlin Philharmonic. These very masculine institutions which have given strong signals to all the orchestras of the world For 10 or 15 years the work has been done and today in orchestras parity is something that goes without saying. In the choirs, it is obvious because they are mixed choirs and men and women were needed for a long time. But apart from orchestras and choirs, in my opinion, there remain whole sections of the activity of an opera house where this parity does not take place: for example, conductors, directors , opera directors. There are many men.
Today the battle is more about the positions of director, conductor and director. We try to have that here, to have as many female soloists as possible in our concerts and, little by little, to also make the female composers visible. Regarding conductors, they are 4% worldwide, perhaps a little more in France, but this is changing profoundly. Me, I open up the field of possibilities, very simply: I listen to conductors without asking myself the question of the gender of the person. It’s already a novelty because I belong to a generation where I heard people around me say that women weren’t made for this job. It was the speech that our teachers held during our studies, even if we did not agree but that has changed. This discourse was a brake and a prejudice. The fact that this prejudice has changed will speed things up a lot. The very young Venezuelan conductor, Glass Marcano advances the history of music and the history of humanity, almost.
She is the first woman of color in Europe to conduct orchestras. This is history unfolding before us. First of all, she is an extremely gifted musician, who has great charisma and who is destined to have a very great career, and this is the primary element that allows her to overcome all prejudices. Racist, xenophobic and homophobic prejudices are still at work and even if things change, they are still there, at different levels; conscious, unconscious, denied, recognized, but always very active.
The fact that a 26-year-old, extremely gifted young woman imposes herself by her talent, over and above prejudices, is what advances mentalities.
This conductor, who has already come in 2021, will return as principal guest conductor, directing the Orchester symphonique Région Centre-val de Loire/Tours four times.
We will also have the chance to welcome Claire Gibault who will come to direct in Tours. She is a pioneer, she was the first conductor in France 40 years ago. She’s the one who broke the barriers, she fought to impose her talent because prejudices were much more important at the time.
It’s important, I’m quite optimistic about the fact that the history of humanity is a progress that goes towards more equality. I think that the arts, like the sciences, or other areas like politics, are places where the progress of consciousness is exercised despite all the difficulties that there may be. I am convinced that, despite the talk we hear today, our society is more advanced than it was a hundred years ago. We participate, art participates in this progress of humanity which is, among other things, the recognition of equality between men and women.
“Well, sing now!” it is the first popular choir of the Opéra de Tours. The idea is to offer the emotion of singing to as many people as possible. Even people who can’t sing, who can’t read music, you have to come and immerse yourself in this emotion of sharing around music. Music is still an incredible thing. The orchestra, you put 60 or 70 people, who know each other or who don’t know each other well, who like each other or who don’t like each other and everyone has to play together.
Music, when it’s successful in an orchestra or in a choir, the collective level must be higher than the sum of the individual levels and that’s almost a social project. If in any human group we achieve that, then we have done something fantastic.
And that’s the adventure of humanity. The 200 registrations for this choir which has just started have been taken by storm. Did we expect that? Anyway, we hoped so. It shows one thing, we have a great desire for that within us. You know, there is this song by Alain Souchon “Sentimental crowd, we thirst for ideal”. I think that our lives, our societies, our human inclination find it difficult to echo this desire for the collective in our individualistic society. These moments of sharing and common construction are essential so we can perhaps see the difficulty we have temporarily today in finding common achievements, in projecting ourselves other than in individualism, yet the need for socialization is as important as the drink and eat. The covid crisis has shown that people who are desocialized are in great psychological perdition. Man is a social being.
Today this enthusiasm for the popular choir is also the consequence of this thirst for building things together. Alongside the popular choir, the idea of ”A Voix Hautes”, a street choir open to homeless people in Tours came from a reflection. I am convinced that everyone needs beauty. When you live on the street, when you sleep on the ground, when you are confronted daily with violence, theft, loneliness, contempt, weaned from everything there is always, as in everyone, the need for beauty. . There is the need to be able to make music, sing together, watch the sun go down, all these things that resonate in us these ancestral things that make us human. They are deprived of that, but I think this socialization around music is important. We will give them that. We will make the voices of the people heard in the street.
With the crisis, there is a big difference between what we are told about migrants, people fleeing their country, we talk about them but we don’t hear them. I think that around these street choir encounters, we will try to offer a radio station to do their portraits, tell their life, anonymously, it’s overwhelming in that we can no longer ignore them when we know their journey , what they went through to get here. There is the desire to give these people moments of musical sharing, to share beauty, to come together, to do things together when they are often each in their own corner and then also to give them the floor, to give them back their voice our ears. It will happen once a month at the Saint Julien church, they will be contacted by the associations. We will sing together, we will see how many people will be there. They will be offered to visit the theatre, meet the teams.
It is a real act of solidarity. It’s an adventure that I’m firmly convinced will be important, but how it will unfold, I don’t know. Will people come several times, will we have word of mouth, 2 or 10 people? Anyway we are on a mission where music, singing is a means of doing things, it is not the goal. When you do an opera, the goal is to raise the curtain and make music, here singing is a way to do human things.
For me, each child born is a bet for society, we will have to bring him to intelligence, culture, science, reason, education, and as soon as we have brought someone to adulthood, there is another to accompany. On a daily basis, bringing someone to art or another field never stops, so our houses, our orchestras, our opera houses have this need to do this work on an ongoing basis, which is to bring people to come towards art, towards beauty. You can have it, in a family that has access to it, who gives it to you or you can offer it to people who don’t have it a priori in their entourage. This is the work of our houses. So that’s essential, because I’m convinced that access to beauty is a determining factor in life. Beauty is all sorts of things, it’s proportion, balance, the emotions that lead to the love of beauty, the balance of justice. In that sense I am quite a Platonist. I think it’s a gateway to a very important moral conscience and in line with life in common. So, from there we have to develop all kinds of actions because this work being infinite, we have to renew it according to the means we have, the access we have to the public or not, the price of places. You have to deploy as many tools as possible to bring people in. Bring them to the show but also bring them to the emotion. Once they have tasted this emotion of live performance, they’ve won!
The question of French music has never been dealt with head-on in our country. Some great artists have become attached to it, such as Michel Plasson or Jean-Claude Cazadesus. They carried this music around the world, at my level, that’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years so we are conductors to carry it but each on our side. When I go all over the world, singers, soloists ask me questions about the French style, ask me where they can come and learn the French style of melody, the alternation of speaking, singing, specific to the Opera French comic. There is no place so I created this first festival which is a kind of first stone that we have to refine and carve and which will allow us, I hope quite quickly, to become a place of sharing around the French style. We will forge a partnership with Michel Plasson’s academy with the idea of creating two places for the transmission of French style and French interpretation. That’s why I created this festival.
And if you have never pushed the door of theTours Opera, follow the advice of Laurent Campellone, go there, more than once. To say I like or I don’t like opera, you have to come several times and let yourself be carried away by your emotions. And if you start right away with the Comic Orchestra-Tour(s) d’ orchestre à vélo, a show given on January 28 and 29 at the Opéra de Tours under the direction of Dylan Corlay, and on January 30 in Bourges.
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