Visit to the Olympe-de-Gouges school in Bondy (26 November 2009)

She came in search of ideas.   As president of a Foundation that supports access to knowledge and learning,  Carla Bruni-Sarkozy visited the Olympe-de-Gouges primary school in the Paris suburb of Bondy on November 26. The school is an acknowledged centre of excellence in a neighbourhood that is reputed to be both difficult and under-privileged (60 percent of its habitations, for example,  are social housing).  Set up in 2007 in the north of the town, the school has an unusual particularity:  a partnership agreement with the choir school of Radio France.  For the last three years, 48 children from CE1 to CM1 classes (eight to ten year-olds) have been following eight hours of special studies a week divided thus: four hours of choir practice, two hours of musical training, one hour of piano and one hour of individual singing.

Bondy has a long tradition of choir music. In 1945 Roger Tribouilloy created the Bondy Schoolchildren’s Chorale which performed on albums by Jacques Higelin and other pop artists.   Here, it is a different kind of music.  The Radio France choir school was established in 1946 by Henry Barraud and Maurice David.  Today it offers a part-time training in classical music to gifted children from the age of nine upwards.   An older partnership already exists with the La Fontaine school in the 16^th arrondissement of Paris, where 80 pupils now take 13 hours of singing classes a week.  Some of these pupils are currently in rehearsal for performances at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (La Bohème, December 15 2009) and on tour with Mahler’s Third Symphony.  “From middle school on, they give about 30 performances a year,” says Sofi Jeannin,  who heads the Radio France choir school. “They know they are in a very prestigious environment, so you don’t see them running in the corridors. Discipline is pretty strict. And yet naturally they remain the children that they are.”

Jeannin – an attractive Swedish mezzo-soprano – is the link between two social worlds which otherwise would never have come into contact.  For now, the children at Bondy give only two or three concerts a year. For the Fête de la Musique (France’s annual nationwide musical festival), they performed at the Senate and the Hôtel Matignon (the prime minister’s residence).  They have also sung at the Pleyel concert hall and the Salle André-Malraux in Bondy, alongside their fellow pupils from La Fontaine. “Their parents notice a real difference in their grades.  Their sense of independence and the work they put in on the musical instruments – it all rubs off on their maths or their geography,” says Jeannin.  For Gilbert Roger, Bondy’s socialist mayor: “It also helps lift the whole neighbourhood. They create examples, role models other than the regular one of the drug-dealer. They bring new life to the place.  Nowadays a child who goes into the estates carrying a volin is not longer seen as a traitor.”

Accompanied by Yazid Sabeg (the government’s equal opportunities commissioner) who explained the role of the Olympe-de-Gouges school, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy watched a singing class given by Sofi Jeannin.  Directed by her firm but gentle hand,  around 30 children worked on a collection of Basque, Catalan and Castilian Christmas songs for two voices and piano, as well as Poulenc’s Bestiaire. “Last year we did  songs by Emmanuel Rosenthal and some 18^th century French tunes.  The repertoire also includes Bartók, Ravel, Benjamin Britten – all classical music for children’s choirs.”

Sitting to one side, Carle Bruni-Sarkozy attentively follows proceedings. According to Sofi Jeannin, the children feel a little intimidated.  This becomes obvious when they are told to line up, facing each other in two rows, before singing. “If you find it hard to look each other in the eye, how are you going to manage with 800 people in front of you?” Jeannin exhorts them kindly.  At eight p.m. on December 18, the children perform their songs in studio 104 (salle Olivier Messiaen) at the headquarters of Radio France.