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The Times, May 17, 2003
If music be the food of love....
Robin Young found himself grandly entertained at a
French villa where musicians play for their suppers
| "Now I have been as
close as I am ever likely to get to having been on visiting terms with the Margrave of
Brandenburg, the Esterhazys, and other aristocratic musical patrons of the past. Thanks to Ian Christians, a modern-day benefactor, I have enjoyed
the extraordinary privilege of hearing world class classical musicians playing in a
private salon for an audience numbered in tens, not hundreds, and seated on comfortable
sofas and easy chairs rather than in rows of concert hall seating.
For immediacy and intimacy this has to be as good as musical
holidaymaking can possibly get.
Christians is a passionate music lover, a former strategy
director of Thorn- EMI, who launched a pioneering wine and recorded music shop in
Guildford in the 1980s. The shop was called Orpheus & Bacchus and, typically,
Christians (author of a series of books called Discovering Classical Music)
commissioned an overture from his drinking companion, the composer Dan Jones, to
celebrate.
Now the shop is gone but Orpheus & Bacchus has been
resurrected, the twin deities now supporting Mr Christians' latter-day business,
converting and letting luxury villas in southern France.
To date he has transformed stone-built farms and outbuildings
into five large and luxurious villas,
each with its own swimming pool, state-of-the-art home entertainment equipment (including
home cinema), all bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, and all kitchens with large ice-making
American fridges.
The properties, in the countryside east of St Emilion, are so
popular in summer Christians finds he can extend his season with an indulgence for himself
and privileged guests - the Orpheus & Bacchus
programme of musical house parties.
Guests of honour are the musicians, forgoing some of their usual
fee in return for four or five days' working holiday with their families. Each evening
they provide a concert for their fellow guests, in the upstairs music room (formerly hay
store) of the villa (formerly winery and barn) at his property Le Faure, in the
hamlet of Le Goge near the village of Gensac.
To help attract high-calibre musicians, Mr Christians has
invested in a Steinway concert grand which previously belonged to Alfred Brendel. He had
to sell a London flat to afford it. But the instrument, which Brendel found insufficiently
bright for large auditorium touring, has proved ideal for La
Musique's oak-floored and heavy-beamed salon.
The Armenian pianist Sergei Babayan (fresh from the Wigmore Hall)
was so enamoured of it during my stay that he could scarcely be dragged from the keyboard,
even at mealtimes. Such was his enthusiasm that, when he was still playing at 1.30am in
the morning, the wife of a former British ambassador to Japan, having risen with her
husband at 4am the previous morning to fly from
Britain to join us, stomped determinedly upstairs from her bedroom below to demand that
the musician finally desist - which he did, thinking, perhaps, that he would play
lullabies in future.
Concerts take an unusual form. Each evening starts with
guest vignerons from the locality or from other parts of France introducing their
wines as a pre-concert aperitif. More wines are provided
at the interval, and after the second half of the musical programme audience and players
together troop round to the neighbouring villa, L'Orangerie, to enjoy dinner, prepared by
the admirable chef,
Georges, in its upstairs refectory.
Georges may be an even more valuable acquisition than the
ex-Brendel Steinway. Formerly at La Bonne Bouille restaurant in Bordeaux, he turned
"flying chef", catering for house parties and weddings some two years ago.
Christians is now himself Georges' most important customer.
The extremely good looking and ultra-suave Georges rewards him
not only by turning in
exceptionally fine dinners, but also by doubling up when required as local tour guide for
outings.
Outings? Oh, yes, Orpheus & Bacchus provide a full programme
of excursions, too. Mine included trips to Bordeaux, its cathedral, waterfront and
shopping streets, and to picturesque Bergerac's well set-up Maison du Vin and engaging
tobacco museum beside the gliding river Dordogne.
There are also trips to tastings in the vast subterranean temple
that serves as second-year cellar at Count Eric de Rothschild's first-class growth
Château Lafite in Pauillac (one of the retired suits in attendance calculated that the
wine in store in that room alone was worth at least £25 million), and at the
distinguished second-growth property, Château Léoville Poyferré in St Julien, where we
were welcomed by the owner himself and guided round by his young, female oenologue.
Add to that an unusually informative visit to the exceptional
British wine maker and authoress, Pamela Atkinson whose concentrated dessert wine, Clos
d'Yvigne, from the scarcely heard of appellation of Saussignac, has been hailed as a top
discovery by The Times's own wine correspondent,
Jane MacQuitty, and a holiday chez Orpheus & Bacchus can be seen to provide a
serious course in wine education as well as a unique opportunity in musical appreciation.
Yet it is right that Orpheus takes precedence. The wine country,
and possibility of wine visits, is there all year round. Vineyards surround Christians'
properties, both at Le Goge and in the nearby village of St.André et Appelles, with
hoopoes looping from pole to pole among the vines, woodpeckers yaffling from the wooded
valley below, kites, buzzards and herons overhead, nightingales in the dividing coppices,
and black redstarts rattling off their song from the buildings' rooftops.
But the (human) musicians come only twice a year. Their next
appearance, between October 3 and 12 (when the visitors will include the violinists Dmitri
Sitkovetsky and Levon Chilingirian and the Brazilian pianist Arnaldo Cohen), will more or
less coincide with the departure of the twittering
swallows which distantly punctuated some of the quieter passages of the spring
performances, and maybe also with peak activity in the surrounding vineyards, the harvest.
But like the swallows the human musicians seem bound to return.
The Kempf Trio were so smitten with the venue that, newly departed as they were on the day
I arrived, two of them (Freddy himself, and cellist Alex Chaushian) were already on the
phone from Britain enthusiastically discussing possibilities for next year's programmes
with Ian Christians."
***** |
| The Daily Telegraph,
March 13, 2004 |
Bordeaux breaks
Michael White enjoys chamber music through a gentle
haze of alcohol and food.
| By Thursday lunchtime, half our
group had downed too much Grand Cru already, during a dedicated morning in the vineyards,
to take in what they were seeing. It appeared to be a piano. But it might as well have
been a giant linen cupboard, laid flat, with a keyboard stuck at either end. The owner,
Frederic, explained that he'd inherited this monstrous Erard double-grand - the musical
equivalent of Siamese twins and very rare - from a great aunt who once presided over
fashionable Paris salons. And its keys had felt the fingers of Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc . .
. the French musical establishment, playing duets. The duettists on this Thursday weren't
quite in that league: they were young, but good. And playing to an audience of 50 in the
shabby-chic salon of Frederic's chateau - by an open fire and with the smell of French
provincial cooking wafting through the door - they were my introduction to the world of
Orpheus & Bacchus. Or, as I was sorely tempted to rename the whole thing, Brahms and
Liszt: a few days in serene French countryside, enjoying chamber concerts through a gentle
haze of alcohol and food. Life can be worse. I'd just arrived
from the airport at Bordeaux, one-and-a-half hours' drive
away, so I was edging into the routine. But the routine of Orpheus & Bacchus isn't
difficult. You join a house-party - for three, four, five days, maybe more - that runs in
what the French call a domaine: an old stone farmhouse built in God-knows-when, with barn
extensions that enclose a central garden. Not luxurious, but comfortable.
By day you sign up (or not, the choice is yours) for
trips out in a crocodile of cars and minibuses (one of which invariably gets lost) for
guided tours of vineyards, chateaux, local curiosities. By night, back at the farmhouse,
there's a concert from resident musicians - punctuated by the courses of a gourmet dinner
cooked by Georges the chef, whose popularity among the guests isn't just based on food.
Tall, dark and smouldering, he could have come straight out of a Gitanes ad, and his
mid-week classes in the basics of Cuisine Franaise (another daytime option) are a big
attraction. Or so I was told.
We came across the double-piano bearing the fingerprints
of Poulenc and Ravel on a day trip out to Sardy: technically a chateau (more a rambling
cottage really), birthright of the aforementioned Frederic (who looked after us and laid
on lunch) and famous for its gardens, which are open to the public and designed around a
single perfectly arranged view, like a theatre-set. As Frederic's guests, you get
assembled at the vantage point and look along a formal, oblong pond that runs beside a
terrace parapet. The house rises behind and, to the side, the land drops down into a
natural valley. "Charming, isn't it," said Frederic with understatement.
Everyone agreed. By this point we'd enjoyed enough of his own Chateau Sardy '94 (or maybe
it was '95) to have agreed with anything.
The beauty of the valley, though, was indisputable,
particularly as there aren't many in this part of France (the Dordogne excepted). Driving
around the vineyards, what you see is largely flat or gently rolling, with vines planted
in long, straight allees (strictly formal: the Versailles touch) and the chateaux rising
like mirages from the open landscape.
They're not massive chateaux - nothing like those in the
Loire with moats and bridges - and they tend, still, to be private homes with work
attached (the work being the wine). But in these celebrated hinterlands of Bordeaux where
each town and village - St Emilion, Margaux, Pauillac - has a name that's launched a
thousand vintages, they rank among the most exclusive private homes on earth. Estates near
Margaux can change hands for more than £2m per hectare, which is why they don't change
hands very often. Some of the more exquisite estates are beginning to be bought up by
exquisite, non-wine companies, as trophies. A case in point is Chateau Rauzan-Segla in the
Medoc, feature of another Orpheus & Bacchus day trip.
Rauzan-Segla now belongs to the perfumier Chanel. And
though it doesn't smell so good - the Bordeaux chateaux always reek of stale red wine, the
smell of sodden carpets after student parties - its appearance is pure Champs-Elysees
chic. From the impeccably clipped hedges to the barrels stored with military precision,
there's a manicured aesthetic to the whole thing. You wonder where the dirt goes, then you
realise there is no dirt: this is the France of dreams, incapable of imperfection.
"But of course, they can't control the weather," says John Salvi. "That's
the one imponderable."
Salvi is our Orpheus & Bacchus wine guide, a local
character who looks like an Old Testament prophet. Such is his authority that he carries
to all our wine-tasting sessions his own personal pewter mug, which he uses as a spittoon.
He doesn't swallow. Indeed, he doesn't drink at all: a peculiar irony for a Master of Wine
but, as he explains, a necessary rule for someone whose experience of the grape was so
extensive it got out of hand. "Now I only sniff the stuff," he says, as though
resigned to living out a punishment from the Greek underworld, before emptying another
cupful of alarmingly expensive Rauzon-Segla Grand Cru '85 into a waiting bucket.
For myself, I've never been adept in wine - I signed up
for this trip more for the Orpheus than the Bacchus element - but after two days following
Salvi from one salle de degustation to another, I could write a book on the subject. I
know about the all-importance of the weather (last year was too hot); about the grape
varieties (in these parts mostly Cabernet Sauvignon for the tannin, the austerity, the
nobility, blended with Merlot for the fruitiness). I know that the claim of Bordeaux to be
France's greatest wine-growing region is based, surprisingly, on the fact that the soil is
so poor (because poor soil makes smaller grapes with thicker skins that deliver more
intense flavours). I learn that the word claret has no official meaning and is simply a
loose and exclusively English term for anything red that comes from anywhere near
Bordeaux. And I discover that the rose bush planted at the end of every row of vines is
not for prettiness - even at Chateau Rauzan-Segla - but for practicality. It lures away
the greenfly from the grapes.
Sitting with Salvi in the crowded restaurant where our
group settles for lunch after another morning at the chateaux, stories flow. He tells us
that the oldest, grandest wine he ever drank was a Lafite 1806, opened with proper
ceremony for some big occasion. And . . ? "And it was fragile and ephemeral, like a
miniature orgasm. A great experience but disappointing if you didn't know what to
expect."
My expectations of the Orpheus side of things were pretty
vague until I met Ian Christians, the Orpheus & Bacchus organiser, and discovered he
was just as serious a music-lover as a drinker. Christians used to be a wine merchant in
Guildford, but he turned the shop into a CD business and then started writing books about
the great composers. When he moved to France and started buying property in 1999, it was
specifically to run these house-parties. He chose the farmhouse-domaine of Le Faure as his
base because one of its long barns lent itself to conversion as a small but acoustically
effective concert room.
Equipped with a full-sized Steinway grand that once
belonged to Alfred Brendel, and a dozen or so sofas, it makes for an extremely comfortable
performing space, but also a very stimulating one, with fresh, young stars such as the
pianists Anthony Hewitt, Freddie Kempf and Yevgeny Sudbin playing alongside established
names like Steven Isserlis, the Chilingirian Quartet and Pascal Devoyon. This isn't
entertainment on the side: it's music-making at the highest level. That it's laid on for
50 or so people, with the artists joining in the parties and the gorgeous Georges' gourmet
meals, makes for a music-lover's dream come true: an open-all-hours Wigmore Hall with
extra-intimacy, beds and better food.
The intimacy means that who you share your sofa with
becomes important. When I was there my fellow drinking/music-lovers ranged from a
Bloomsbury publisher with her ear-ringed husband to an Australian teacher on a world tour
and a worryingly intense American psychotherapist who played the piano in the middle of
the night (though not the Alfred Brendel grand, which was declared out of bounds after
complaints). For anyone whose inner child was insufficiently well-serviced by the music,
food, or the intense American, there was also a relationship counsellor from Highgate who
didn't seem to be in thrall to either Orpheus or Bacchus but just liked the place -
especially the sun-trap by the swimming-pool (Le Faure has two), where I'd have joined her
but for my professional devotion to wine research.
And that, alas, turned out to be the problem with the
whole idea of Orpheus & Bacchus. After an exhaustive day of tastings, lunch with wine,
more tastings, and then staggering back for (naturally) pre-concert vins d'honneur, those
sofas were a terrible temptation. To which some succumbed.
Of course, I didn't sleep myself: it's easier to
concentrate with closed eyes. I remember every nuance of that Liszt sonata after we got
through the Chateau Barsac '98. Or was it Schubert ?
*****
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