CHARLES ROBERTS Patronage in the form of ready cash from private donors has always been a feature of the living arts. But here in the depth of rural south-west France there has grown quietly, over the last decade, a small-scale music festival of uniformly high quality.

CHARLES ROBERTS

Patronage in the form of ready cash from private donors has always been a feature of the living arts.

But here in the depth of rural south-west France there has grown quietly, over the last decade, a small-scale music festival of uniformly high quality. Each year, the audiences get bigger and the box-office take grows accordingly.

The 2007 event has just ended. To keep continuity alive, scattered through the year are about six concerts, given in country churches. All come under the umbrella of Musique entre Nous (Music shared between Us).

The mastermind behind this fund of richly varied music in performance is Jean-Jacques Pagot, owner of the Manoir de la Thibaudière, “headquarters” of Music entre Nous.

Since I and my companion started attending the concerts four years ago, there've been infrequent notes in this column, warmly commending the programmes and performances; but very little about the creator himself.

Jean-Jacques was born, as they say, into a humble home where music was absent. Yet spontaneously over his formative years, he discovered classical music and acquired a great interest in it.

“My first expenses when I was a teenager”, Jean-Jacques recalls with a nostalgic smile, “ were to buy music discs, or to buy tickets for concerts”. Side by side, he had a lifelong interest in literature. But there was another powerful force at work . . .

“All my life I have been asking myself how I came to be a business lawyer. How I managed this work - so intellectual, but with no sentiments. And simultaneously found the time for all my interests in all forms of the arts.” A glance around his handsome library, with its abundance of pictures and sculptures, where we talked, underlined just how real is his devotion.

He was, he confesses, passionately dedicated to his legal career. He was to become in due course Bâtonnier de l'Ordre des Avocats. That is to say, “Patron/boss” of the lawyers of the department of Vienne.

“But somewhere it deprived me from enjoying to the full my personal dispositions and my arts interests.”

Clearly he is sad at not having had the chance to learn to play a musical instrument, and to study music. “My parents, at this period, did not have the necessary means. So, I am not a musician. I am a music lover only.” A precise and modest response, and typical of J-J.

Through the years that followed he was consistently buying records and listening to them. And in doing so, his son François became immersed at an early age in his father's interests. This is probably why, at the age of four or five, he was singing Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, and a lot of baroque music, too.

François was 17 when he discovered his counter tenor voice. He had yet to acquire all the sensitivity of this genre of music. Now, these days, says his father with reasonable pride, he is singing at the Chapel Royal at Versailles.

“Our idea, at the beginning, was to invite young artists to come here to play in public. This idea has grown with the years, with our experience and our relationships . . . to give concerts of high quality, to give to musicians coming here the best means of expressing themselves. For example, our visiting pianists have a very beautiful and very good instrument for them to play.”

A Steinway, of course! It lives in a splendid barn, the centrepiece of the concerts, now converted into an attractive concert hall which, by happy chance, has an excellent acoustic. “We have improved it every year,” says Jean-Jacques. “By fitting a wooden floor, for example.”

But how does he find all the remarkably talented young artists who are so happy to come here?

“Nowadays it is easy. Our small festival is beginning to have a very good, solid and true reputation. So the very good musicians who have been here, talk about it with others, and we have more and more spontaneous candidates. This in turn enables us to make a choice.”

J-J has consistently followed the advice of a musical friend to invite each year a well-known figure in music-making. “If an important musician comes, the consequences for the young musicians taking part will be much more important. It is the prestige.

“Our aim is to have a beautiful place, a beautiful moment, with beautiful music, to have the festival better known. Yet in the end the event is a good way of meeting people of the same sensitivity. . . and to make beautiful meetings.”

t If you would like to know more about Musique entre Nous, call Jean-Jacques Pagot from the UK on (00-33) 612-47-16-38; or François Reye on (00-33) 603-33-92-05.