"More Mozart ! " by Pierre Cao - Artistic director
"Vocal music dates" by François Patriat - Président of Burgundy's Regional Council
"In Vézelay the music of the stone, wind and light is blended", by Henri de Raincourt, President of the Yonne General Council

This year, as we commemorate the birth of Mozart, the Rencontres Musicales de Vézelay Festival couldn't resist the chance to do homage to the Kappellmeister of Salzburg Cathedral and to some of his contemporaries.  Part of Mozart's peculiar genius lay in his ability to produce masterpieces in every musical form in which he composed.

True to its traditions, Vézelay will devote much of its Seventh Festival to sacred music.  Our audiences will have the pleasure of hearing some of Mozart's most famous works, the Coronation Mass, the Requiem and the Ave Verum Corpus, probably his best-known and most perfect composition.  It goes without saying that these will be performed by Arsys Bourgogne, accompanied by the Stradivaria ensemble.  The famous Vesperae Solonnes de Confessori will also be performed, by the prestigious Stuttgart Chamber Choir and Orchestra under the direction of Frieder Bernius.

Vézelay will also pay its respects to the Mozart's contemporaries.  First among them, Michael Haydn, Joseph's younger brother and also Kappellmeister at the Cathedral.  His Requiem will performed the day after Mozart's, which, as you will hear, was greatly influenced by it.  Arsys Bourgogne, will also have the pleasure of performing Michael Haydn's Missa Sancti Hieronymi, composed in honour of Hieronymus Colloredo, Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, and highly praised by Leopold Mozart in a famous letter written to his son the day of the work's first performance on All Saints Day 1770.  For this concert Arsys Bourgogne will be accompanied by the famous Zefiro ensemble, conducted by Alfredo Bernadini.  The capital importance of this work made it an obvious choice for Arsys Bourgogne's  next CD recording project.

It also behoves us to pay our respects to Antonio Salieri, who frequently conducted Mozart's works and whose own compositions Mozart greatly admired.  Although best known nowadays for his supposedly conflictual relations with Mozart, Salieri held a number of important positions in Vienna and carried with him all the honours Mozart dreamed of for himself.  He was an eminent composition teacher, his pupils including Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt and even Mozart's own son.  We all know how his reputation was tarnished after his death by rumours that he had murdered Mozart.  This myth was propagated by Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov, then more recently by the English dramatist Peter Shaffer, whose play Amadeus was turned into a film by Milos Forman.  On the third night of the Festival you can hear one of his loveliest works, the Mass in D Major, dedicated to the Emperor Joseph II, in which intimate contemplation alternates with joyous festivity in perfect balance.

Mozart would certainly have liked the idea of associating his name with the Première of a new composition.  We therefore asked the composer Philippe Schoeller to write a piece in honour of Mozart.  The result is Spiritus Amadeus, a work for unaccompanied choir.  The work will be followed by a performance of the Requiem, on the opening night of the Festival.

Habitués of our Festival will be familiar with our afternoon concerts, where this year we welcome for the first time two talented and famous French musicians, Patrick Cohen-Akenine and Jérôme Correas.  With their ensembles, Les Folies Françoises and Les Paladins, we will rediscover Boccherini's magnificent Stabat Mater, and the virtuoso Italian motets of Jommelli, Hasse and others. And now for this year's innovation, for which we have the Rector of Vézelay's Basilica to thank:  Arsys Bourgogne and Stradivaria will take part in the Sunday morning service.  We will thus be able to celebrate the liturgy with music, just as it was celebrated in Mozart's day.

It only remains for me to tell you that the 2007 Rencontres will celebrate the theme of ecumenism, a subject which will enable us not only to offer a rich and varied musical programme, but also a debate to help us better to understand this complex issue.

Pierre Cao - Artistic director
pierre.cao@rencontresmusicalesdevezelay.com
Pierre Cao's biography


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Since the birth of the Rencontres Musicales de Vézelay Festival in 2000, the Regional Council has lent its support to this excellent festival dedicated to vocal music.

Every year, under the aegis of Arsys Bourgogne, the Festival brings together more than 3000 French and foreign music-lovers to Vézelay's 'eternal hill' to hear some of the profession's greatest exponents, including Arsys Bourgogne itself.  This professional choir, established six years ago with both national and regional support, is now recognised as one of Europe's leading vocal ensembles. Both its pure and homogenious timbre and the special attention which its conductor, Pierre Cao, gives to the text, are universally acclaimed. 

This year's theme, following Eternal Light in 2003, the liturgy of the Mass in 2004 and King David last year, is to be Mozart and his contemporaries  Michael Haydn and Antonio Salieri.  You can discover, or rediscover, great works such as the Coronation Mass or the Requiem in an array of concerts - free concerts, pre- and post-concert recitals outside the Basilica and in Vézelay's Place Borot.  Far from being an elitist event, the Rencontres Musicales de Vézelay Festival sets out to be a period of festivities open to as many people as possible.  We hope you will enjoy yourselves.

François Patriat - President of Burgundy's Regional Council


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Thus wrote Abdelkader Djémaï, the first writer in residence at the Maison Jules Roy during the summer of 2001.

And when Pierre Cao and Patrick Bacot decided, as they walked through Vézelay two year earlier, that the festival which they were planning could be based nowhere but here, the Yonne General Council decided to lend its support to their project.

From its modest beginnings, the Rencontres Musicales de Vézelay Festival has grown to rank as a major artistic event not only of regional but of national importance, as one can see from reading the national and international press.

I look forward to this seventh Festival, dedicated to Mozart and his contemporaries, and shall greatly enjoy attending live performances of such key works as the Requiem, the Coronation Mass and the Solemn Vespers of the Confessor, which so many of us only hear on recordings.

I have no doubt at all that this latest Festival will remain etched in our memories, just as I am convinced that Arsys Bourgogne and all the soloists, conductors and ensembles whom we have invited to take part in the Festival, will provide a large number of music-lovers with a stock of indelible musical images, memories and emotions to take home with them from Vézelay's 'eternal hill'.

Henri de RAINCOURT - President of the Yonne General Council


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