Green dome

I have been looking forward to this day for weeks. We went to Montolieu, to see cellist Matthieu Saglio live for only the second time, the first being in 2013. He's French but lives in Valencia. I do follow him on Facebook and he tours in both countries, but never seems to come anywhere near us, whether in France or Spain. When he said on Facebook earlier in the year that he would be in our area and had some spare dates, I did make a bid for Serge to book him as part of our summer season, but it was too late at that point. So I put the Montolieu date in my diary right away, and also emailed the gallery owner to reserve seats given that it's an hour's drive away.

Montolieu is a "book village" like Hay-on-Wye, so we got there at about 5:30 for a look around some of the bookshops (yes, books were bought). The concert was in one of the art galleries in the Manufacture Royale, a huge seventeenth century factory where sheets were made by 250 employees at 137 looms. In 1939 the disused site was used to house Spanish refugees in fairly squalid conditions. Parts of it are ruined and overgrown now, but the standing parts house a restaurant, B&B, and a number of art galleries (extra 1 for an inside view). 

The evening went a bit pear-shaped at this point as the waitress who assured us we would be served our meal with plenty of time to spare eventually brought our food to the table half an hour after ordering, and we had five minutes to bolt half of it down before rushing down the road to squeeze into seats in the rather small gallery. The cheerful and friendly artist in charge, Christophe Souques, was busy cutting cardboard packaging into squares and handing them out to the audience to use as fans.

Because we were so late, our view was not good, but it didn't matter. Being in a small, intimate venue is always the best way to enjoy live music. Softly spoken Matthieu's music, all his own compositions except for a quick flash of Bach at the end, is mesmerically beautiful and haunting, a mixture of influences from around the Mediterranean. At one point a swallow flew into the open window and did a few circuits above our heads, adding an extra bit of magic. In these conditions there seemed little point in taking photos, but I liked the way Matthieu's shadow was projected onto one of the paintings on the wall, so extra 2 is a very poor cropped phone photo for the memory -- this was how much of him we could see!

Everyone stood to applaud at the end, and we got a couple of encores that unlike yesterday were definitely appreciated. Remarkably, the concert was free, with a jar for money at the exit. S doubled his donation compared to yesterday, and I bought a CD of his latest album, Voices. I listen to this often on Tidal, but artists need to sell CDs too.

I'm linking to a piece he played this evening, El Abrazo, from the album  El Camino de los Vientos -- a haunting memory of the last time he hugged his grandfather.