NEWS

The Festival presents "Chansons de Shippagan"


The Festival presents “Chansons de Shippagan”

Free virtual concert: Travel to the heart of Acadian Folklore and French Baroque Music!

Lamèque, N.B., Tuesday, July 14, 2020: The Lamèque International Baroque Music Festival is proud to announce the presentation of a free virtual concert entitled "Chansons de Shippagan" featuring soprano Suzie LeBlanc, recorder player Vincent Lauzer, violinist Marie Nadeau-Tremblay and lute player Sylvain Bergeron. The concert will premiere on the Facebook page of the Lamèque International Baroque Music Festival on Saturday, July 25, 2020, at 5 p.m. (New Brunswick time). This concert will be an opportunity for Festival supporters and music lovers from around the world to appreciate and discover the magnificent music that can be heard every summer in Lamèque. 

The program will feature “Chansons de Shippagan”, traditional Acadian songs collected by Dr. J. Dominique Gauthier from 1950 to 1957 and published in a collection by Les Presses de l'Université Laval in 1975. The musical program for this concert was created following research by soprano Suzie LeBlanc, who has always been committed to exploring and presenting, in concert or on disc, the Acadian folk repertoire. The scores of Les Chansons de Shippagan, sometimes with great rhythmic complexity and a rubato tempo, are written in a style that sometimes resembles that of the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque period. For this concert, new arrangements for period instruments by the four musicians will be presented in a world premiere. The musicians have also chosen a few French baroque works by Jean-Baptiste de Bousset, Louis-Claude Daquin and Michel Lambert, based on themes from the Chansons de Shippagan. 

All four artists have a special connection with the Lamèque Festival: Suzie LeBlanc is of Acadian descent and has attended the Festival several times in recent years; Vincent Lauzer has been the artistic director of the event since 2015; Marie Nadeau-Tremblay won First Prize and the Audience Award at the Mathieu Duguay Early Music Competition presented in 2019; lute player Sylvain Bergeron is a musician with a solid reputation and has often visited us in Lamèque. 

For this project, the Festival collaborated with videographer Jérôme-Luc Paulin of Ísjaki Studio (Caraquet) as well as Montreal videographer artist Emmanuel Crombez and his team. The musical performance was filmed at Montreal's Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur, and the concert will also feature inspiring images of Shippagan and the islands of Lamèque and Miscou, immersing the listener in the atmosphere found in the region during the Festival period. 

The Lamèque International Baroque Music Festival, the oldest of its kind in Canada, will officially celebrate its 45th anniversary in July 2021. Full program details will be announced in the coming months.