Aix en Provence, 16 July 2025

Wednesday morning in Aix en Provence saw our Hayllar Music Tours group board our coach and head into the beautiful Provençal countryside. We visited Château La Coste, part vineyard and winery, part sculpture park, part art museum. It's an absolutely beautiful place - I remembered it with great fondness from our visit last year - with enormous sculptures on a walking trail, part of which we explored with our guide.

I posted a lot of photos from here on Facebook last year but if you wanted to find out more, check out their website.

I did take photos, though, of a small exhibition of exquisite works by a Korean artist, Ha Chong-Hyun, and I'll post some of those here.

After this we had a beautiful lunch at La Bastide de Venelles, a restaurant nestled into the countryside just outside Aix. The constant buzz of cicadas made me feel very much at home.

In the early evening back at our hotel I gave my talk to our group in preparation for attending our evening performance. This was an orchestral concert featuring the Bavarian Radio SO, conducted by Simon Rattle. It was one of the finest performances I've ever been privileged to witness.

The program was Ligeti's Atmosphères, the prelude to Wagner's Lohengrin, and Bruckner 9. Apart from the sheer brilliance of the performance, the program was given without interval (all done in 90 minutes) and in particular (as I suspected he might) Rattle performed the Ligeti and Wagner without a break. The latter grew - beautifully and logically - out of the silences at the end of the former. And Bruckner's final, unfinished, symphony seemed perfectly placed to follow.

It was stunning.