Les Métaboles bring an a cappella selection of Christmas carols to Arc-et-Senans. Léo Warynski draws on lesser-known collections from Latin America and Africa, placing them alongside European and Caribbean songs. Antillean carols he sang as a child give the programme a personal thread, joining newly encountered scores with music that left a lasting impression on him.
Tag: vocal-music
Sweet Mama: Jazz, Swing and Washboard
Sweet Mama brings blues, swing, boogie-woogie and calypso to Sens with a line-up led by Catherine “Cajoune” Girard. Her washboard and voice join guitar, violin and double bass, with kazoo and slide whistle adding further colours. The quartet shapes its own arrangements around influences including Charlie Christian, Stuff Smith and Fats Waller, drawing on jazz and blues repertoire.
Keren Ann + Mathis Akengin in Concert
Keren Ann brings Paris Amour to Arc-et-Senans, pairing intimate songwriting with carefully shaped sound. Her tenth studio album continues a musical approach built around warmth and precise composition. Opening artist Mathis Akengin introduces Passage des Fleurs, his debut album, whose contrasts between fragility and force follow appearances at the iNOUïS section of Printemps de Bourges.
Chansons en pêche: Fishing Lives in Song
Fishermen’s songs in French and Breton recount working lives at sea and changing fishing practices. Chansons en pêche follows an orally transmitted repertoire concerned with whales, cod, sardines, tuna and lobster. Anecdotes and images accompany the sung poetry, bringing the words of fishing communities into a concert in Douarnenez.
Danakil Live at Le Roudour
Danakil arrives at Le Roudour with the roots reggae sound that has carried the French collective from small clubs to major festival stages. The set draws on Demain peut-être and its expanded Reload edition, pairing weighty rhythms with socially conscious writing. The band’s independent Baco Music story and long connection with audiences give the Saint-Martin-des-Champs concert a clear place in today’s French reggae circuit.
Charlotte Planchou and Mark Priore
Charlotte Planchou and Mark Priore form an intimate duo in Le Carillon, where song enters a flexible jazz framework. Alongside voice and piano stands an old mechanical carillon once owned by Planchou’s grandmother, treated as an active character within the music. Its measured chimes interrupt, answer and colour the songs, adding a dreamlike, almost cinematic layer to the performance. The same idea shapes the duo’s album, but the concert remains open to change, with repertoire and interpretation adapting to the room. Priore’s playing and Planchou’s vocal presence favour detail over display, keeping emotion close to the grain of each song. At Le Blanc, the encounter becomes a live conversation among two musicians and an inherited object whose sound carries memory into a contemporary musical language.
L’Oranger Early Music Concert
L’Oranger brings early Occitan music from France and Spain into a programme of courtly tunes and folk traditions. Mezzo-soprano Ariane Le Fourmis performs alongside Zuzanna Dubiszewska on traverso and Layal Ramadan on viola da gamba. Pierre Baptiste Brioude-Dhénain completes the ensemble on theorbo and baroque guitar, giving the concert its combination of voice, flute and string instruments.
Vaslav Cabaret Theatre
Vaslav is Olivier Normand’s flamboyant cabaret-theatre recital, built around a fantastical persona, lavish make-up and sequins. The solo performance explores fluid identities through humour, theatrical transformation and a voice that moves from baritone to countertenor. A shruti box supplies its hypnotic drone as cult songs and popular music pass through the room. Barbara, Grace Jones and David Bowie meet Schubert, West Side Story, Michel Legrand and even the force of a Bizet aria, creating deliberate collisions between genres and eras. Normand treats the stage as a laboratory for character, sound and poetic androgyny beyond the shape of a conventional song recital. Extravagance never stands alone: fantasy and emotion become tools for questioning fixed roles and celebrating the freedom to shift between them.
Les Maîtres Sonneurs
The Kraken Consort brings Celtic songs and instrumental tunes to Les Maîtres Sonneurs at Besançon’s music festival. Flutes, bagpipes, cittern and theorbo weave around the singers, drawing on traditions from Ireland, Scotland and Brittany. The eight musicians connect oral repertoires with written music in a programme named after George Sand’s novel.