Joël Mamet · 8 September 2017
From Saturday, Besançon’s music festival offers an unusual, playful “symphonic immersion” in the noble setting of Palais Granvelle: how to conduct a virtual orchestra.
There is a hint of Buren’s columns inside the most famous monument in Besançon’s historic centre, the Renaissance palace built by Nicolas de Granvelle. Eight handsome stone cylindrical bases have appeared on the courtyard gravel, like ancient remains, some low, others higher.
They are meant to be climbed on; if that is difficult, you may sit. The result is the same: triggering a group of instruments, different for each column base, which begin playing an excerpt from a work. The background of tuning violins that previously filled the space stops. It is fun to hop from base to base, testing the effects: strings, winds and percussion.
Better still, a conductor’s desk faces the bases arranged in a semicircle. With someone standing on one, another person climbs the desk’s steps and acquires the power to vary the intensity of different instrumental families, bringing their hands near the instruments’ images on a crescent-shaped wooden structure. Immediately, double basses become quieter or stronger; likewise horns and flutes.
Whom do we thank?
The visitor becomes a conductor controlling the sound “generated” by the column fragments. On behalf of everyone fascinated by great maestros: thank you! To whom? Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, a Milanese in his forties with an impressive CV, well known in Montbéliard where he teaches at the conservatoire. Founder of Ensemble de Musique Interactive, he invents new ways to bring scores to life in all forms.
His Granvelle installation uses sensors, cameras and computers: powerful technology serving classical essentials. “It is indeed a tribute to the great symphonic repertoire,” he says, with excerpts from Beethoven’s Seventh, the First symphonies of Brahms and Schumann, Mahler’s Fifth and Ravel’s Boléro, encountered during twenty-five minutes of playback.
The festival commissioned the installation for its seventieth edition, starting Friday, with plenty of real conductors too.
Symphonic Immersion: Palais Granvelle courtyard, Besançon, 9–23 September, daily except Monday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Free. Contact: 03 81 82 08 72; www.festival-besancon.com.
Caption: inventor Jacopo Baboni Schilingi at the conductor’s desk; in the background, occupied column bases trigger the works. Photograph: Ludovic Laude.
Let the celebrations begin tonight!
The seventieth Besançon music festival starts Friday with a free outdoor opening concert at 8.30 p.m., featuring the regional Orchestre Victor Hugo Franche-Comté conducted by Jean-François Verdier in famous Italian symphonic and operatic repertoire. A weekend highlight is Saturday’s 8 p.m. concert at Théâtre Ledoux with London’s Royal Philharmonic and a prestigious conductor, in Mozart, Ravel and Stravinsky. [The conductor’s first name is not reliably legible in the archived scan.]