The wall between stage and pit is just one of those that can exist between people, even playing the same music in the same place at the same time. However, thanks to Covid 19, a chink appeared in that wall last night, and through it the twain did most certainly meet.

Our story began in March with a phone-call. In it, Sara Hershkiwitz, who lives half in Berlin, half in LA, explained that her opera season in Tours had been canceled and that she was stuck. There were almost no trains, airports were closed, and who’d want to go anywhere near them anyway? Could she please come and isolate in our rental house? A very expensive taxi ride later she rolled into the little hamlet of Les Baux and made her temporary home two minutes from mine at the foot of the Mont Ventoux.

Isolation was a serious business for us both and only after two weeks did we allow ourselves the first in a series of a social distancing aperitifs. In a nearby cherry orchard we sat under our chosen canopy, each of us carrying her own bottle and glass, and, as the wedding white blossom came and went and the fat red fruit appeared, conversations about life and music flowed into the increasingly warm night air. On one such evening we heard that there was to be a super moon. Given that time was expanded and there was nothing to do and nowhere to go (Sara would, that night, have been singing in Tours and I on a duo tour of India with Saskia Rao) we decided to sit on a wall and watch her rise over the orchard. Inspired and free, we began to sing our favourite songs to her. The first was, naturally, Moon River. A lot of Joni Mitchell followed (as is usually the case when two or more females of average intelligence are gathered together), and by the time we were on Amazing Grace, the occupants of

the hamlet, hearing sweet notes on the night air, appeared from their houses and gathered round. When we finished, they applauded and wept. They then took the spontaneous music making into their own hands, launching into an enthusiastic, if not somewhat inebriated, chorus of Halleluljah. (The Jeff Buckley version, of course, not Handel). Suddenly, a dozen folk who would otherwise never had met, found common ground in music and were singing to the moon. Together. Despite physical distance, we were touching one another deeply

And so it was, on this wall in a small Provençal hamlet, that a few barriers dissolved -barriers between a tutti cellist and an opera diva, between musical cultures and classes, nationalities, languages and creeds. Music does this, we thought, and oh, how we miss it.

Meanwhile,The Collectif Citoyen de Bedoin had a good plan. A plan to get artists back to work and live music back into people’s lives. A small scale festival in residents’ gardens was set up in a few weeks and Sara and I joined forces with my friends Marie Madelene, Mario and Damien to see what would happen if we placed the following in one room and on one stage in one moment: Three members of an Occitane polyphonic trio, one opera singer (who happens also to be an ace folk singer) and one classical and baroque cellist who happens to love folk music. The result was last night’s concert held on Sylviane’s terrace in Saint Colombe. Framed by rose laurel on the edge of a terra cotta terrace, watching storm-clouds receding behind the Dentelles de Montmirail, the five of us made music together. With our voices and instruments to hand and heart we made the sounds of an accordian, a ballad riff, an improvised gospel choir – whatever was needed in the moment to support a Provencal folk song,

Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Wayfaring Stranger, Down to the River to Pray and Amazing Grace. We shared a stage and we played and sang together. We sang our hearts out to the mountain, and to the folk who live at its foot. We sat on a wall between cultures and peoples and, for one moment in time perhaps, we sang that wall right away.

That is what live music can do.

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