You are going to give your first Christmas concert in Bordeaux, but we assume that you have already conducted many in your career…
Oh yes, it’s one of my favorite concerts! And what I like even more here is the contact with the public that this formula makes possible. People tell us what they want to hear, we talk with them, we break this invisible barrier that usually exists in concerts. The downside is that we have to rehearse many, many works. Much more than we could play in a single evening
Radio Classique Christmas concert in Bordeaux: the public can vote!
He is one of the familiar voices of Radio Classique: Jean-Michel Dhuez is preparing to present the Christmas concert of the Bordeaux Aquitaine National Orchestra for four sessions from December 19 to 22, with an original concept: the public will choose the works, in a show of hands
How do you choose these works?
I am spoiled for choice. There are so many masterpieces in the scores that I’m like a little boy in a candy store, who has to choose between all kinds of candies and chocolates (laughs)! We have set several categories – opera choruses, Christmas carols, slow and poetic movements… – and for them we offer passages from “Peer Gynt”, “Eugene Onegin”, but also waltzes by Strauss or “Little drummer boy” (in French “L’Enfant au tambour”, Editor’s note).
And with this voting system it will never be exactly the same program that will be played from one evening to the next?
That’s what I hope! And, frankly, it would be very surprising if the spectators of two different evenings chose exactly the same pieces. What I would like is for the same people to come several evenings in a row!
