Two editions were enough for the festival Un temps pour elles to register as an unmissable event for music lovers. The 2023 vintage also looks promising with fourteen concerts in prestigious sites such as the Abbey of Maubuisson, the castle of La Roche-Guyon or the cathedral of Pontoise. Meeting with cellist Héloïse Luzzati, director of the event.
How did the idea of the festival come about?
Héloïse Luzzati. The festival is backed by an association called elles Women Composers and whose project is to make visible the works of women composers. Throughout the year, we identify works that are not played, we decipher the scores... There is a lot of substantive work to be done. We look in libraries, we try to find the descendants of these composers. Some of his works have already disappeared.
How to explain that this work has not been done before?
There are names of female composers among music lovers identified, but very few. The history of music was written without women. When I was a student, we never played the work of women. And I'm only 38 years old! Today, that tends to change. After that, the major difficulty is to get people to listen to music they don't know.
What are the highlights of the festival?
It is a mixture of works identified as the music of Clara Schumann, but the goal is also to mount lesser-known works, especially in the closing weekend organized at the Domaine de Villarceaux. Every concert is a small journey. But we have as a common thread the women who won the Grand Prix de Rome. We also work on interdisciplinary, as for the actress Greta Garbo or the concert of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the writer Colette. We also have the opening this weekend at the abbey of Maubuisson or the concert of Sunday 18 dedicated to two French composers, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, at the abbey of Royaumont.
There is also a label...
We created it last April and we published a major monograph of the composer Charlotte Sohy, who died in 1955. We sold all the records and there were a million streams. It is a hoped-for but unexpected success. The label is named after our video channel La boîte à pépites, which presents the lives and works of women composers. Everything is connected. We start from research and then we work on the means of dissemination and mediation. The last part we work on is editing the scores.
From June 10 to July 9. Information and full program on https://elleswomencomposers.com/festival-un-temps-pour-elles.