Cérick Barray’s wicker installations bring plant forms into the Cistercian abbey of Noirlac, and light reshapes its architecture after dark. A Christmas concert puts voices at the centre in the abbey church, a storytelling performance follows, and two artists rework classic Christmas songs on bells. Parent-child workshops and a themed tour open the monument another way. An arts and crafts market and the abbey tea room round out the programme.
Tag: vocal-music
Bogue d’Or singing workshop with Rachele Andrioli
Rachele Andrioli leads the singing workshop of the Bogue d’Or, one of four run by the Groupement Culturel Breton des Pays de Vilaine. Work turns on polyphony and on what the Apulian repertoire shares with Eastern Europe, Africa and South America. For its 51st edition the festival has left the Croix des Marins for the Carré 9 and its marquees, home to fest-noz, fest-deiz and the concours chant à danser. Andrioli sings again at Chicass’Noz.
Visite chantée de Saint-Efflam par Marthe Vassallo
The Festival de Lanvellec et du Trégor takes its audience inside the église Saint-Efflam at Plestin-les-Grèves for a guided visit that doubles as a recital. Marthe Vassallo, one of the greatest voices of Breton music today, walks the building with Natacha Adlerfliegel, the festival’s guide conférencière. The reading of the church is broken at intervals by chants traditionnels bretons. The sung repertoire returns under the vault that framed it.
Gwennyn présente Enez à l’Espace Keraudy
Enez is Gwennyn’s staged creation, built from dance, song, lighting and costume. Some thirty artists share the stage with her, among them the storyteller Patrick Ewen and musicians well known on the Breton music scene. She sings in Breton, and the costumes she wears were designed by the Quimper embroiderer Pascal Jaouen. The evening lands at the Espace Keraudy in Plougonvelin, one of the halls carrying the creation across the region.
Guillaume Yaouank at the Ballons Rouges
Guillaume Yaouank grew up in the maritime air of Lorient and sings with nothing but his voice and a guitar. His repertoire is maritime folk song in its purest form, with a Breton seafaring flair and a detour to his Irish cousins. Five albums and years of touring in France and abroad sit behind the set. He plays the Café Théâtre des Ballons Rouges, a small room in Lamballe-Armor.
Hatiao Club: Azou’s secret cabaret, Plouzané
Azou kept a club nobody in her family knew about, and at her death her three grandchildren push its door open on the eve of the funeral. What they find is a cabaret, played by Cie La Lavée in song and spoken récit over an omelette and bread and butter. Mathilde Martinage built it from interviews and collected testimony, so the fiction carries real Breton voices. The Centre culturel François Mitterrand at Plouzané takes it from ten years up.
Chantons avec nos jeunes enfants, in French and Breton
The École de Musique Danse Théâtre du Kreiz Breizh sings with parents and children under three at the library of Plouguernével. Songs, comptines and finger games run in French and in Breton, as Kanomp gant hor bugale vihan. Nobody has to sing well: parents hand their own top-50 rhymes round. It is one of twenty-four free meetings the Communauté de communes du Kreiz Breizh spreads over twelve communes, run here with the association RAOK.
Concert de Noël de l’Ensemble Choral du Bout du Monde
The Ensemble Choral du Bout du Monde sings its Christmas concert in the parish church of Saint-Michel at Lesneven. The ensemble states that its first vocation is to promote the Breton language, and it carries the Breton name Laz-kanañ Penn ar Bed. It gathers more than eighty choristers and a dozen musicians under the direction of Gwenn An Dreo. The programme sets original compositions beside arrangements of Breton, Welsh and Celtic songs.
Spontailh at the Fête des Babigoù, Paimpol
Spontailh is a bilingual Breton-French musical tale that Awenn Plougoulm brings to the Fête des Babigoù in Paimpol. She sings and tells of the Samain, the moment when the door to the other world stands open, and glosses her own title along the way: in Breton, spontailh means scarecrow. Her songs and stories are drawn from the repertoire of the Monts d’Arrée. Two sittings are programmed at La Sirène, one for babies and one for older children.
Pêr-Vari Kervarec & Caroline Faget: bombarde et piano
Minutes Papillons in Baud hands an evening over to a duo and a Morbihan table. Pêr-Vari Kervarec plays the bombarde and sings; Caroline Faget answers on piano, the reed’s carrying power against the keyboard’s delicacy. Two live sets fall between the courses, at shared tables. The kitchen works from the produce of its own territory and the know-how of local producers, so the gastronomy and the Breton culture arrive on the same plate.