At La Roque-d’Anthéron, Anne Queffélec’s refined Beethoven

2023-07-24 18:15:02
Concert by Anne Queffélec, at the International Piano Festival of La Roque-d’Anthéron (Bouches-du-Rhône), July 22, 2023. VALENTINE CHAUVIN

“I try not to be fashionable. I prefer to throw them! » René Martin, the artistic director of the International Festival of La Roque-d’Anthéron, whose 43rd edition is held until August 20, has enough to claim his status as a talent scout. The event invites some four hundred artists to the heart of Provence for around a hundred concerts (including ten free) on eleven stages scattered around the region, from the Cistercian abbey of Silvacane to the Théâtre des Terrasses de Gordes, obviously passing through the Parc de Florans, its place of origin since 1981, which sealed the meeting between a young Nantes man passionate about music and the Rocassian mayor, art lover, the late Paul Onoratini (1920-2 010).

If the first generation of heirs had without hesitation taken over from the patriarch through an association managing the festival and land heritage, as the years passed, the threat of a sale of the estate loomed. This is why the announcement, on July 20, of the transfer of the Parc de Florans and the surrounding agricultural land to an endowment fund created by a group of patrons led by Xavier Moreno, current president of the Cérémé (Cercle for the study of ecological realities and the energy mix) as well as of the Normal School of Music in Paris, was welcomed with relief. Especially since the project guarantees the conservation of the founding values ​​of the festival: bringing together the world’s piano elite each year while attracting the widest possible audience.

“A Seamless Transition”, assures Marie-Claude Alcaraz, daughter of Paul Onoratini and deputy vice-president of the International Piano Festival association, now alongside its new president, Jean-Louis Blanc, passionate about classical music, and president of the company Cremonensis, specializing in the brokerage of collectible instruments of Italian violin making from the 17th and 18th centuries. A durability that artistically illustrates this July 22 the pianist Anne Queffélec, pillar of La Roque-d’Anthéron since the beginnings, in the Fourth Piano Concerto by Beethoven, of which René Martin programmed the complete, accompanied by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta orchestra.

Duel between piano and orchestra

The slender figure of a young girl at 75, Anne Queffélec joins the concert Steinway 609 chosen the same morning from the six instruments made available to the artists – four Steinway Ds, a Bechstein D, a Fazioli D, the piano and electro group Grandbrothers having, the day before, used a Kawai, while Alexandre Tharaud will play on July 27 on a Yamaha CFX. La Française is not one of those pianists who strike out or disorient: the motif that opens the concerto is placed like a ball in the center, which the conductor, Yip Wing-sie, seizes to play it with her feet. The piano deploys the music in long lines, in a very Mozartian fluidity, a freshness that does not exclude the dream. We have known more brilliant, exciting, hard-hitting cadences, but few with this delicacy, these almost Schubertian iridescences.

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