“Today, I’m making a dream come true that I didn't think would be achieved until far in the future!” Leonardo García-Alarcón’s beaming face appears on my screen. Between performances of Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the conductor speaks with infectious enthusiasm about La Cité Bleue, a magnificent theatre located in Geneva's Cité Universitaire. Founded in 1968, it’s an emblematic venue for new music which has just reopened in March 2024 after a complete renovation. García-Alarcón has been its general and artistic director for the last three years.
He is a leading specialist in early music and Baroque opera. He is also a harpsichordist, organist, conductor, teacher and even composer. In 2005, he founded Cappella Mediterranea; five years later he took over as director of the Namur Chamber Choir; in 2014, he founded the Millennium Orchestra. With La Cité Bleue, he has a new string to his bow, and by no means the least important: “I’ve long dreamed of running a venue dedicated to the creation of innovative shows designed by musicians, a venue where the musicians are at the origin of all the projects rather than being not contacted at the last minute when everything is ‘oven-ready’, when the project has already been defined by a general director or a stage director. It means that when a musician is asked to think about a project for a new show, he finds himself in a kind of panic, because he’s not used to being given the initiative. I had already received several offers recently to run musical institutions, but I turned them all down. It was the time of the pandemic that made me change my mind: I myself was hit by Covid-19, I was bedridden for five weeks and I wondered about my relationship with Geneva, a place where I have been welcomed, where I have lived and worked happily since 1997, ever since I arrived from Argentina.”
And so, when the Fondation La Cité Bleue decided to completely renovate the venue and asked him to design and implement the new artistic project, the Swiss-Argentinian conductor accepted the job: “This 300-seat venue allows artists and audiences to be very close to each other. It also has a very beautiful stage with a width of 16 metres. It has a prestigious past as a mecca for new music and art, having hosted many inspiring personalities such as John Cage, Luigi Nono, György Kurtág and, more recently, the Latin American stage director Omar Porras, whom I invited to the inauguration of the renovated hall in March 2024, and who thus passed on the torch to me.”
I ask García-Alarcón how he was involved in the renovation project at La Cité Bleue, which took two years to complete. “I was able to work with the architects, within the constraints of a heritage venue whose acoustics were very dry and ill-suited to music played without amplification. As the Fondation La Cité Bleue wanted to carry out a complete renovation at the cutting edge of technical progress, the hall is now equipped with a modular pit and an extraordinary electro-acoustic system called the ‘Constellation Acoustic System’ which alters the acoustics of the hall instantly in real time, thanks to a system of microphones and loudspeakers placed throughout the stage and the hall. At first, I was against this type of system, but I was able to test it and was amazed at how natural the sound was, for the musicians as well as for the audience. In the blink of an eye, this system can recreate the acoustics of Notre-Dame de Paris or the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, as naturally as possible, without giving the impression that the sound has been reworked artificially.
García-Alarcón explains a project he is currently developing: a creative space for all kinds of music, enabling original stage projects in which music enters into dialogue with other disciplines such as theatre, dance and visual or digital arts. ‘‘Three or four times a season, we plan to make the hall available for six weeks to an artistic team to give them time to create a truly innovative show. For other, less demanding forms, it will be possible to book the hall for a week to create staged or partly staged performances. Finally, we will welcome productions that have already been created if they are in line with our artistic approach.
How, I ask, does he envisage organising governance and life in La Cité Bleue, knowing that his time will inevitably be limited given his busy schedule? He smiles. “In France, there's a very vertical way of managing projects and institutions: at the top there's a thinking head who decides everything. It’s different in Switzerland, where organisation and decision-making are much more horizontal, with real teamwork. Having worked in so many different countries, I could write a book on how each nation organises itself, because the habits are so different, including on the administration front!”
I therefore ask about his new job as artistic director: is it different from that of an orchestral conductor, and what does it bring to him? First, he draws a parallel: “In early music, teamwork is natural because many works are performed by ensembles made up of soloists.” But he immediately adds that his new duties broaden his field of vision: “It's a chance for me to develop my interest in the interactions between music and other artistic disciplines, to become more open to other aesthetics, to other horizons. Many musicians tend to confine themselves to scores as if they were in a sealed-off universe.”
So we discuss the “universes” that await audiences at La Cité Bleue in the 2024–25 season. García-Alarcón starts by telling me about Fabrice Murgia’s Seasons, “an original creation combining theatre, social cinema and music; a closed-door show on the highly topical theme of contemporary solitude in big cities. It’s a situation experienced particularly by some of the students at the Cité Universitaire de Genève, where we are based.” He then mentions Job, “a music drama written and composed by Michel Petrossian, which will explore the notion of unjust suffering and will create a dialogue between baroque, traditional and contemporary music.”
He continues with Stabat Mater, “a music theatre creation based on the work of Domenico Scarlatti and designed by conductor Simon-Pierre Bestion and director Maëlle Dequiedt, that will take the audience on a journey through the centuries”, then moves on to Astor Piazzolla’s Maria de Buenos Aires, which will be performed “in its original form and personnel under the direction of bandoneonist William Sabatier”. Next, he describes Erismena by Francesco Cavalli – “it’s the first opera to have been translated into English.” There isn’t time for him to list all the shows, each more original and stimulating than the last!
And indeed, it's almost time to end our conversation, but García-Alarcón doesn't stop, listing other projects about which he feels strongly and on which he is starting work. “I would like to create a Swiss Music and Education label, create a new early music competition as well as a scheme to provide better support for young musicians, because I've noticed that not so many young Swiss people continue their musical studies at the country's conservatoires, given that salaries are so much higher in Switzerland in many professions other than that of musician.” The interview ends, García-Alarcón’s face disappears from my screen and I am left amazed by the multiplicity of his projects and the creativity he demonstrates. In the wake of such an artistic director, a whole city could soon be dreaming again.
See upcoming events at La Cité Bleue.
This article was sponsored by La Cité Bleue.
Translated from French by David Karlin
