Casadesus (Jean-Claude)

Orchestra conductor. Founder of the Orchestre National de Lille / Directed two concerts in Séquedin prison as part of the Foundation’s concert programme for relegated audiences (14 October 2010)

Henri Casadesus, who is a musician’s grandson and indeed the heir of a long lineage of artists, decided to take “elite” music to where it was unwelcome or unavailable back in 1975. After serving as musical director at the Théâtre du Châtelet, and then as permanent conductor at the Opéra de Paris, he founded the Orchestre National de Lille in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a disaster-ridden region. The textile and steel mills, and indeed full industrial sectors, were crumbling at that time. Jean-Claude Casadesus took over an orchestra that had been “sacked” when the recentralisation drive transferred the ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) to Paris. He had just been conducting the Pays-de-Loire Philharmonic Orchestra, and turned the one in Lille into an orchestra that has exported its music around the world. The audiences it plays for vary considerably, but its standards do not. It tours prominent theatres, and factories (a 3 Suisses unloading plant), psychiatric hospitals, churches, schools and prisons in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. “Yes, art is elitist, but elites have a heart,” says the son of Gisèle Casadesus (75). There is a youthful version of him smoking a Lucky Strike, the first cigarette he smoked, which he had bummed off a GI during the Libération. As he was born in 1935, he is aware of how fortunate he is to live in a free country – at least that is what he seems to be saying with his cigarette. “I had always wanted to get involved in writing, literature, theatre the plastic arts, and much less so in music, and to see it become part of people’s everyday lives, like an essential need, a philosophy. Words can’t describe that feeling, when you’ve been lucky enough to be part if it, that completely levels the playing field, for the most affluent and the most vulnerable, in front of this magical planet.”