17 August/18 August 2019 ★ FT Weekend 15Arts
G
ood to be well prepared for
William Christie!” a mem-
ber of his team had sug-
gested by email as I planned
my visit to Thiré, a small
village in the Vendée region of France,
an hour’s drive from Nantes. It has been
the American-born conductor’shome
since 1985, when he bought what was
then an abandoned farm. In addition to
resurrecting the building he designed an
extravagantly beautiful garden around
it, which now hosts a yearly festival,
“Dans les Jardins de William Christie”.
Since 2012, the event has served as an
intimate showcase for his pioneering
music and vocal ensemble Les Arts Flo-
rissants. This month, the 2019 festival
will stage some 100 performances —
concerts and “promenades musicales”
— for up to 9,000 visitors.
Just as Les Arts Florissants, which cel-
ebrates its 40th anniversary this year,
travelled back in time to reinvigorate
baroque music, Thiré seems to hold the
21st century at arm’s length.
When Christie welcomes me on a blis-
tering July afternoon, the 74-year-old is
every inch the gentleman farmer —
down to the issue of Country Life by the
fireplace and the tales of French coun-
tesses who invited him for drinks at
their châteaux.
He also has, as I was subtly warned,
the imperious manner to match. When I
express admiration for the restoration
of the lavishly decorated French 16th-
century house we’re sitting in, he repliesPastoral sympathy
William Christie| The
conductor discusses French
music, gardens and resisting
anti-elitism. ByLaura Cappelle
Clockwise from
above: William
Christie in his
gardens in
Thiré, Vendée
region, France,
photographed
for the FT by
Elliott Verdier; a
lakeside concert
at the annual
‘Dans les Jardins
de William
Christie’
festival; a
performance of
‘Extraits de
Monsieur
Pourceaugnac’
Jay Qin; Julien GazeauHe bought the property in Thiré in
1985, just as Les Arts Florissants’ plan to
lift the 17th- and 18th-century French
repertoire out of the doldrums was tak-
ing off. “French music simply couldn’t
talk or speak, it had lost its eloquence,
because people were applying the wrong
tools,” Christie remembers. The next
year, a historically informed production
of Lully’sAtysat the Opéra Comique in
Paris marked a turning point for the
ensemble. Not that Christie’s fame was
enough to mollify his village neigh-
bours: he describes their reaction to his
arrival as “cold fury”. “I came into it not
knowing that it was one of the most dif-
ficult villages in the entiredépartement
in terms of the way it deals with people it
doesn’t know.”
Three decades on, Thiré is mostly
peaceful, not least because of Christie’s
lasting commitment to the area. While
he has always had gardeners to help, on
the day we meet, he was up at 6am to
weed and water, and he is at home as fre-
quently as his conducting schedule
allows. “I’ll come down for 24 hours if I
haven’t seen the roses, or the irises, or if
there are problems. A garden is like hav-
ing a family.”
Over time, the garden has become
several gardens in one. From the
elaborate ornamental patterns that
greet visitors in thecour d’honneurtoa
cloister and the gorgeous green theatre,
with its yew hedge trimmed into elegant
curving shapes, it feels both old and
new, and was added to the Supplemen-
tary List of Historic Monuments in- During the festival in late August,
“musical promenades” take visitors
around its parterres and alleyways for
short afternoon recitals, with evening
productions performed at themiroir
d’eau, the water garden, and at Thiré’s
nearby church.
“It’s Arcadia,” Christie says. “It’s the
whole idea of the pastoral dream: you
have songs, you have music, and it gets
mixed up with wind, air, birds, water.
There isn’t a baroque opera, from the
mid-17th century to the end of the
French Revolution, that doesn’t some-
where evoke a lovely, beautiful garden.”
The conductor’s pastoral vision is tak-
ing over the entire village: Les Arts Flo-
rissants now owns a dozen buildings
near Christie’s property, and is planning
for the future. In 2017, the company
became a Foundation, with plans to pre-
serve its methods and offer a growing
number of year-round artist residencies.
Several rehearsal studios are in the proc-
ess of being completed.
Every other year, the festival also
serves as a vehicle for the Jardin des
Voix, an academy of young singers who
come from around the world to train for
three weeks with Christie and his team.
Graduates include the Bulgarian
soprano Sonya Yoncheva; this year, the
academy will perform Mozart’sLa finta
giardinieraalfresco.
Christie, who defines himself these
days as a “cultural, intellectual ostrich”,
has little patience for the less idyllic
world outside Thiré. “I don’t deal with
that, you see,” he says of the anti-elitist
sentiment sweeping across many coun-
tries. “Do I buy into it? Obviously not.
And the people whotry to involve me in
crossovers, I simply just ignore.” Chris-
tie prefers what he calls “a good defini-
tion of being elite — that is to say, being
one of the best.” The master of this
house certainly expects nothing less.August 24-31, arts-florissants.comReviews
The Warner Brothers Story
Ten years have passed since the John
Wilson Orchestra first appeared at the
BBC Proms — and what a decade it has
been. Wilson’s ambition to search
out original orchestrations of the
Hollywood and Broadway classics
and to perform them with a tip-top
symphony orchestra has provided
a Proms highlight year on year.
Thanks to the Proms’ international
reach, the word has spread. An
appreciation of film scores and
musicals is everywhere looking more
respectable, including the opening
event of the Edinburgh International
Festival a couple of weeks ago — a
concert of film music, headed by
composer John Williams, played by
the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
There was some John Williams in
this 10th-anniversary Prom too,
though not until the encores. Each
year Wilson casts his net into a
different part of a well-stocked
pool, and his programme in 2019
turned to the golden era of Warner
Bros studios.but they did hope their initiative would
show that young people from across
the divide could work in harmony.
Two decades on, they have been
proved right on both counts. The
politics of the region may be as
combustible as ever, but the
performances of the West-Eastern
Divan Orchestra have become a
model of musical collaboration.
The orchestra’s frequent visits to the
BBC Proms are always a highlight —
and never more so than this year,
when they returned with Martha
Argerich as soloist. The chance to
catch her in Tchaikovsky’s Pianosolo, replete with organ, from
Korngold’sThe Constant Nymph.
And that encore? A five-minute
extract fromHarry Potter— a reminder
that Warner Bros has not lost its
magic touch.AAAAEWest-Eastern Divan Orchestra/
Barenboim/Argerich
It is 20 years since Daniel Barenboim
and Edward Said had the dream of an
orchestra that brings together young
musicians from Israel, the Palestinian
territories and other Arab countries.
They never imagined it would solve the
political problems of the Middle East,Many of Warner Bros’ greatest film
scores owe their style and ambition
to the arrival in the US of a pair of
Austrian-Jewish émigrés in the 1930s —
Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang
Korngold. Between them, they
established the romantic orchestral
soundtrack as the Hollywood
standard. These are the pieces that
sound so spectacular played live by the
luscious string section and ranks of
brass of the John Wilson Orchestra —
scores such as Korngold’s flamboyant
The Sea Hawkor the lesser-known
Bronislaw Kaper’s gently waltzing
Auntie Mame, one of the more modest
discoveries here.
A special word has to be put in for
Steiner’s music for the Bette Davis
classicNow, Voyager. Wilson has
arranged a memorable suite from the
film himself. Like so many Jewish
émigrés of his era, Steiner knew his
Wagner, and there is a hypnotic slice
ofTristan und Isoldeburied in the
middle of it.
This year’s concert was more of a
showpiece for the orchestra than usual,
but there were also three singers —
regulars Louise Dearman and Matt
Ford, together with rich-voiced
soprano Mikaela Bennett. For the
closing item, a fourth operatic mezzo,
Kate Lindsey, made a celebrity
appearance for a short but imposingMartha Argerich
and Daniel
Barenboim with
the West-
Eastern Divan
Orchestra at the
Albert Hall
BBC/Chris Christodoulou‘There isn’t a baroque
opera that doesn’t
evoke somewhere abeautiful garden’
Concerto No 1 was not to missed.
This is the biggest concerto the
pianist has played in London in living
memory and, at 78, her fire has
barely dimmed.
Never mind the occasional splashes
of wrong notes. Argerich remains a
one-off, as volatile now as when she
was a young firebrand. Who else would
dare rattle off double octaves with the
ferocious speed of a rifle squad and
then, as if turning on a sixpence,
conjure a scene of fairytale magic?
The result was a sometimes stop-go
performance, at odds with the
patient majesty of Barenboim’s
conducting, but Argerich remains a
uniquely inspiring pianist, with
spontaneity, colour and imagination
to burn.
The richness of sound that
Barenboim brought to this rendition of
Tchaikovsky has become bedded-down
in the playing of the West-Eastern
Divan. They sounded darkly romantic
in Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony
and full of brio in Lutoslawski’s
Concerto for Orchestra. There was just
one, hugely powerful encore:
Beethoven’s Overture toEgmont,
Goethe’s drama about the fight against
oppression — a suitable finale, as
Barenboim had passed up his usual
chance to give a political speech from
the stage.AAAAEEnigma Variations
On the next night came the most eye-
catching Prom premiere of the season.
To mark the 60th birthday of
conductor Martyn Brabbins, the BBC
has commissioned a new work after the
style of Elgar’sEnigma Variations.
EntitledPictured Within: Birthday
Variations for MCB, it follows the same
layout in detail. The novelty is that
each variation has been written by a
different composer.
They are a prestigious group. As with
Elgar, the theme itself holds a mystery,
as it is by an unknown hand. There is a
bluesy variation by Sally Beamish; a
punchy romp from Wim Henderickx;
and a soulful number from Kalevi Aho.
Harrison Birtwistle gets the challenge
of matching Elgar’s “Nimrod” with a
variation of timeless meditation and
John Pickard rounds everything off
with a swashbuckling finale.
Other composers include Dai
Fujikura, Colin Matthews, Brett
Dean and Judith Weir.
The work as a whole is varied and
entertaining, if not exactly celebratory.
Brabbins and the BBC Scottish
Symphony Orchestra were splendid
in it — more so than in their lacklustre
performance of Elgar’sEnigma
Variationswhich followed, mirror-like,
at the end of the concert.AAAEE
Richard FairmanMUSICBBC Proms
Royal Albert Hall, Londonwith a hint of disdain: “If you have any
notions of architecture and historical
style, it’s not that difficult.” I feel chas-
tened — as one often does in the pres-
ence of the eminent conductor. His col-
laborators talk about him with the awed
deference often reserved for older male
artists who have been labelled geniuses,
and he is clearly used to it. “Bill is a tiger,
a predator, with a killer’s instinct,”
one of his former protégées, the soprano
Sandrine Piau, was quoted saying in a
book about Les Arts Florissants. I’m
worried he will pounce when I ask if he
considers himself demanding, but
Christie nods. “I impose what I think is a
healthy discipline,” he says, before add-
ing, deadpan: “Sometimes a temper is a
good thing.”
Christie doesn’t exactly soften when
his two passions — music and gardening
— come up in conversation, but it’s clear
they are genuine. His parents planted
the seeds for both, encouraging him to
learn the harpsichord and to spend timein the family’s suburban garden near
Buffalo, in upstate New York.
“I had a little plot, three or four feet. I
planted bulbs in the autumn and they
turned into tulips and hyacinths.”
After studying at Harvard and Yale
and teaching music for a year at Dar-
mouth College in the 1960s, Christie left
the US “under a cloud”, as he puts it,in
order to avoid being drafted for the Viet-
nam war, which he opposed. His interest
in early French music led him to settle in
the country in 1971. “I wanted to drink
at the source,” he says — and he soon
found his way to the Vendée region.
He had long had a vision for a garden
of his own.“The dream house had to be,
essentially, a house that I could restore,
it had to be old, and it had to have noth-
ing around it,” he explains. “I didn’t
want an established garden. If you’ve
got pretensions of being a gardener, as I
had, and still have, you don’t want a gar-
den that’s been made by somebody else,
as beautiful as that can be.”
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