Artistic director of the Saint-Céré Festival, from July 29 to August 10, Jean-Baptiste Henriat embodies with his artists the new wind of classical music.
A graduate of public affairs studies from SciencesPo and then a professional singer for around ten years, Jean-Baptiste Henriat joined the management of the Radio France choir in 2020 to ensure its general delegation. Then, he took on the role of artistic director of the Saint-Céré Festival alongside Véronique Do, the director. “My job is to meet and bring people together, that’s the nature of the programmer’s job. And since I know the artists well, I can sense what they need to express in one way or another,” he says.
“There are bounces from edition to edition”
A young man of 34 with a discreet appearance, Jean-Baptiste Henriat represents a generation: “There is something generational in chamber music with a commitment that breathes life into the Saint-Céré Festival with these new and audacious entries. It is about programmatic imagination, interpretative, not always perceptible because the concert must remain “self-supporting”, the living moment shared with the audience intact. But with the Sarbacanes ensemble for example (July 30), the musicians explore period instruments and do a whole musicological work around the scores, through new arrangements. In “Where I go at night” (July 31), Jeanne Desoubeaux starts from the pop of Philippe Katerine and wanders far from classical music, to the place of the mixture of styles as in “La fête sauvage” (August 3) with its electronic percussions; also, the pianist Natanaël Gouin rewrote for his own fingers on the piano “L’île des morts”, the piece for orchestra by Rachmaninov. »
The meetings of the curious, on the sidelines of the concerts, offer times for exchanges with the public to explain these approaches. “Thus, there are rebounds from edition to edition and the concert becomes only one of the sides of the project. For this, I advise the artists in their first programs, and often, it is on site in Saint-Céré that we imagine the rest… That is also the idea: to make them come and come back.”
Thus Eva Zavaro, scheduled for August 3 and 4 in a solo violin recital, was a violinist on “Les Apaches” with Didier Cendres last year. The women’s choir Guillemette Daboval (August 4), a young choir and orchestra conductor, has created a program for the occasion. “I accompany both the conductor and the Esquisses ensemble. It is the relationship that allows us to imagine things, to create together. The festival becomes, not very embodied by the direction, but a festival of artists, committed to the public because it is this meeting that must take place. And every year I feel a real pleasure on the public side, to meet these young artists that they know.”
