2023-06-27 17:05:00
The educational structure of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, is multiplying all-terrain initiatives and maintaining its proximity to the artists.
For twenty-five years, the Festival Academy has continued to expand. The structure initially planned to train young singers on the threshold of a promising career is now interested in instrumentalists, launches productions, organizes reflections as well as workshops during the year, and on the programs sprinkles each distribution with asterisks referring to the note: “Former artist of the Academy.” “After the pandemic, we experienced a kind of intuitive precipitation, it was important to be closer to the artists and the public, recounts Paul Briottet, its deputy director. We have developed around three poles: the Academy itself, which accompanies singers and pianists, who then take part in Festival productions; the concert season, with more intimate forms where we also allow artists carte blanche, and musical theatre, which allows us this year to offer, for example, The Faggots and Their Friends.”
Maousse presentation
All these interpenetrating territories are linked by a dense traffic network. Such a composer or such a singer taking part in a production or a recital has passed through the Academy in the past (like Ted Huffman and Philip Venables for The Faggots…), and the academicians of the year (10 singers and 3 pianists, for 300 auditions of pre-selection) are highlighted in a series of three concerts culminating in a Maousse presentation on the Cours Mirabeau on June 29. Today, the Academy is as much an educational instrument as a laboratory.
But back to basics. What do we teach there? How do we work on the voice? This Monday afternoon, on the second floor of the Cube, building of the Aix university complex, a Norwegian singer has an appointment with the Briton Darrell Babidge. Accompanied by an academician pianist, the soprano whose range also covers the mezzo begins to sing a song. Babidge, also director of the “voice” department at the Juilliard School in New York, listens. “Often, students tell me that I should write a method. But I don’t. Each time, I bend to what I hear, to the particularities of the singers in front of me”, he explains to us before the course. You shouldn’t write a book, but a thousand books and, in fact, the half-hour lesson he gives is haute couture.
The feat of the note to come
First, Babidge brings binding to the vocals. It makes the sentences resume by flowing them more. His finger pointing in the air draws the undulating flow of the voice as if tickling a bird. Then he notices that, if the academician manages without problem to reach the high notes, her impulses are helped by her body. His face, his neck, but also his general attitude prepare the exploit of the note to come. What Babidge will then work on is the context of the sound production. “Relax your jaw. You don’t need to prepare as much. Do nothing to find this note, you know how to sing it,” he smiles. “It’s difficult,” she replies.
He then suggests an exercise to her: stand straight with her back glued to the wall and, at the same time as she rises in the treble, bend her knees to lower her body, and thus dissociate her voice from her gestures, measure that she can sing without the help of anything else. In the gaze of the singer, who had rather prepared her accuracy and her power before the lesson, there is a certain skepticism. She nevertheless leans against the white wall. The pianist takes over the piece, the academician performs, sings while bending her knees. Several times. The sound is different. Not in its accuracy, but elsewhere, in its ease. “Here, you feel, it’s better, isn’t it?” Babidge congratulates her. She smiled, as if a gear had come loose: “Wow. Wait… This is a new feeling for me.” But also a lesson for us, who were able to verify that if the mind leaned on the body to produce a sound, this body, while helping, also hindered.
Parade(s) 2023, with the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble and the Académie du Festival, Thursday June 29 at 9:45 p.m., Cours Mirabeau, Aix-en-Provence, free admission
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