City Lights!

Just like in Chaplin’s film, the city lights illuminate the 15th edition of Les Athénéennes from June 3 to 13. Cities and music.
In the plural, just like the festival’s program, which cultivates its eclecticism with infectious enthusiasm, blending artistic rigor with the greatest diversity of styles.
Cities in music. Or the music of the city? The two are inseparable, shaping the musical imagination as urban landscapes transform. Music and the city—they attract each other, gaze at one another, and respond to one another. Thus, Vivaldi’s virtuosity remains inseparable from Baroque Venice, and Mozart’s genius from Imperial Vienna. The Paris of the Impressionists captured a thousand glimpses of a capital in full swing. Similarly, Steve Reich drew from the tumult of New York to fuel his unbridled creativity, just as Iannis Xenakis contemplated the engineering of the built environment as an accomplished composer-architect.
Both born of rhythm, are architecture and music not twins in Western thought? Thus, the myth of Orpheus had its hero building ramparts with the sole sound of his lyre. While Goethe saw in architecture a verstummte Tonkunst, a “musical art reduced to silence,” mute, silent.
We also know what Stravinsky drew from the industrial world—urban by definition—when composing his extraordinary, mechanical rhythms. Just as we know what the blues, jazz, and rock owe to the fertile ground of urban culture. How electronic music emerged from the wastelands of Detroit and Berlin. The world is vast, and cities are countless. The journey promises to be wonderful, taking us all the way to the Mediterranean and beyond. To Iran, where, for centuries and even today, the sophisticated modal repertoire of Persian radif remains intimately linked to its birthplace, Tehran.
The city, a place of encounters, migration, and invention, offers Les Athénéennes a luminous theme, a welcome guiding thread in these times of uncertainty and violence. In the heart of the bustling city—at times magnificent, dazzling, so beautiful; at other times, alas, a monster devouring its children—Les Athénéennes create a haven of peace, a garden of emotions, a bubble of harmony where it feels so good to take refuge, sit down, listen… And dance.
Welcome to the 15th Les Athénéennes, a place for all kinds of music!

Learn more about Les Athénéennes