Thirty years. This is the number of years that president Yves Henry and artistic director Jean-Yves Clément spent side by side at the helm of the Nohant Chopin Festival.
Three decades during which they will have programmed some 500 concerts and brought the elite of pianists, all determined to defend, in the home of George Sand, the romantic repertoire.
The inaugural visit of Aldo Ciccolini in 1966
Friday June 21, 2024, the two men invited the public to a retrospective of the festival which, since its first hours in 1966 and the inaugural visit of Aldo Ciccolini, has seen a number of unforgettable performers and shared magical moments with the public .
Thirty years peppered with anecdotes, too, that the pair told us with relish and emotion, this Friday. The first arrival of Evgeny Kissin, in 2010, and the two Steinways that the latter requires from the programmers (one on stage, the other at his hotel). That of Ivo Pogorelich, in 1995, of whom we do not know until the last minute whether he will be there for the concert, who must be picked up at Maxim’s, in Paris, and who breaks two piano strings a quarter of hour before the concert.
The list of great performers who have passed through the festival is long but the duo also wants, through archive photos, videos and the prism of memory, to evoke the memory of people who, year after year, constituted the DNA of the festival: the tuner Jean-Louis Nouvel, Jean-François Cazala and a number of faces that time has sometimes taken away.
Thirty years in the past also means revisiting each other’s youth, seeing childhood for some of those who would become today’s prodigies, seeing the less gray temples of our two protagonists but also those of some elected officials and people present in the room.
The evolution of the festival
Thirty years is above all realizing to what extent the world has changed and the festival has evolved. When Jean-Yves Clément and Yves Henry combined their skills to take charge, it was only a matter of a few dates.
Then comes the pairing of the Nohant Romantic Festivals and the Chopin Meetings which will give the event its current form: four weekends in June then one week in July.
In 1966, Aldo Ciccolini offered his first concerts in Nohant. He will return there in 1982, 2002 then in 2014, when he is 89 years old, and declares “fear every time it will be the last”. It is on his aged face that Yves Henry wishes to complete the retrospective, on this figure who is about to disappear but in whose eyes the soul of music and that of this festival in particular continues to shine.
Yvan Bernaer
Next dates: Saturday June 29, 4 p.m.: talk-meeting “Samson François (1924-1970) in Nohant on June 26, 1970”, by Alain Beauvais (photographer) and Bruno Rigutto (pianist). At 8:30 p.m.: recital by Augustin Dumay (violin) and Frank Braley (piano).
Sunday June 30: at 11 a.m., discovery springboard with Bohdan Luts (violin) and Yves Henry (piano). At 4 p.m.: piano recital by Alexandre Kantorow. Information, prices and reservations on www.festivalnohant.com
