Music everywhere

Music is everywhere in Paris. We wake up to the bells of St-Julien-le-Pauvre behind us and of Nôtre Dame just across the Pont au Double. Buskers busk on every corner or every train in the tourist areas, and some of them are good. Wednesday night walking back from the Ile St Louis at 9.45pm a trad jazz group was playing outside the Square Jean XXIII. Last week another group, set up their upright piano and drum kit on the Pont St Louis and played Hot Club de France style. The next day we saw a guy with an upright on the Boul Mich at Cluny, and the following day another on Blv Saint Germain at Place Sartre-Beauvoir. For a while we thought it was the same guy.

Paris is one of the professional musical capitals of the world, so you expect to see a lot of the good stuff (which is one of the reasons we keep coming here). I’ve already commented on Renée Fleming in Arabella at the Bastille, but the week has also seen concerts by a couple of great mezzo-sopranos.

Susan Graham performed at the Théâtre du Chatelet on Saturday 23 June with accompanist Malcolm Martineau. Our seats were front row centre, which is a bot too close for my liking, but it gave the performance an intimacy which it may not have had, even in a place as small as the Chatelet. Graham sang scenes and songs by Purcell, Berlioz, Schubert, Wolf, Duparc and Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim’s ‘The Boy From…’, a hilarious parody on ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. In her encores she sang Reynaldo Hahn’s ‘À Chloris’, a song guaranteed to leave me a puddle on the floor, so that was an unexpected bit of magic.

On Tuesday 26 it was the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to hear Joyce di Donato sing a programme of songs about or inspired by Venice and written by Vivaldi, Rossini, Fauré, Hahn and Head. Joyce sounded more comfortable singing the more florid pieces – coloratura is what she’s best at. In the second half she wore a figure-hugging floor length gown, and if she’d had her hair up in a beehive you’d have sworn it was Dusty Springfield. I wonder how ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ would have gone down with that crowd – they loved ‘Over the Rainbow’.

I’ve previously mentioned a piano recital we attended at the church below our flat. On Sunday afternoon we went to another one, Jean-Christophe Millot playing Beethoven (including the Moonlight Sonata) and Chopin (including the Minute Waltz). To hear a Steinway in a small church is a tad scary; the sound fills out every nook and cranny of the building, making the startling bits unnerving even when you expect them.

On Thursday 21 was the Fête de la Musique, an annual event started thirty years ago, in which musicians play free concerts anywhere and everywhere. The official guide listed 240 events for the Paris area alone, and we saw several performances that weren’t listed. As we ate dinner in the flat that night we were serenaded by African drumming, a brass band from across the river, and a rock band from somewhere in the rues below us. Outside the Trois Mailletz around the corner from us in Rue Galande was a trad jazz band, Les Papyfous sont laches (The granddads are on the loose). In the Rue des Prêtres Saint Severin a crowd surrounded an Italian community choir that had distributed song sheets and was calling for requests. A drum band blocked the Rue de la Huchette and deafened everyone, and over in Place Saint Michel a band was playing Allman Brothers style rock. We eventually wound up in Notre Dame listening to an organ recital.

And then there is the everyday music of the tourist quarter, the honking of the traffic, the sirens of the emergency vehicles and the drunken chanting of pisshead soccer fans on the river boats. The other night we had a very good saxophonist busking for a couple of hours in a square nearby; quite an improvement on the usual ambient sound.