When nature and music come together!

At the end of the 18th century, François-Joseph Bélanger, a major architect of the Enlightenment, designed the plan for this park in a single night. It took 900 workers just two months to complete it!

Before the concert at the Orangerie, guides (in French and English) took us on a tour of the history and trea-sures of this astonishing park to the west of Paris.

Along the way, we came across a waterfall, an ice-house, a pagoda, sweeping vistas, water features and a profusion of peonies, the subtleties of which our guide explained to us... The tour ended with a visit to the famous rose garden, which boasts some 10,000 rosebushes.

Then, in the Orangerie, we attended a concert given by the Trio Pantoum, a young ensemble supported by the ProQuartet Foundation, organisers of the "L’Orangerie sonore" Festival.

And what brilliant sound it was! These extremely talented young musicians began with Haydn and his beau-tiful trio in A major, then moved on to Saint-Saëns, whose triumphant romanticism overwhelmed us with sparkling waves of sound. They finished with a more disconcerting but superb work: Weinberg’s trio op 24,
written in 1945 by this young 26-year-old composer, the only survivor of his family from the Holocaust and the war. There is indeed violence in this work, particularly in the paroxysm of sound in the attack, then in the hammered toccata in the piano and finally in the tremendously wild crescendo of the fugue. The evening ended magnificently, with a drink in hand, in the company of the artists, thanks to ProQuartet.

Annie Lionnet -
© Bienvenue en France AL