On the occasion of the Easter holidays, LCP is rebroadcasting the program “Rembob’INA” which Patrick Cohen devoted, on March 15, to one of the numbers of the famous weekly program “Musiques au coeur”, which Eve Ruggieri hosted on Antenne 2, then on France 2, from 1982 to 2009. The journalist revealed to the general public many young classical music performers, promising a great career – among others Natalie Dessay and Roberto Alagna – and welcomed the greatest artists of international musical life.
Eve Ruggieri, born in 1939 and always dashing elegance, is invited by Patrick Cohen to comment on the show she dedicated, in 1995, to Samson François (1924-1970), brilliant and meteoric pianist: this bird of night with bald hair and brown eyelids, who frequented jazz clubs, started his day (the afternoon) with a Ricard and smoked like a fireman, was to die at the age of 46 of yet another heart attack.
But he left a dazzling memory, and anthology discs, including Chopin programs or the two Concertos, by Maurice Ravel, recorded in 1959 with André Cluytens and the Orchestra of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire. And a complete Claude Debussy, interrupted by his death, between two recording sessions, Salle Wagram, in Paris.
” Excess “
The same evening, in his “Pop Club” at France Inter, where classical music was rarely heard, José Artur paid tribute to this “authentically popular artist, as no pianist has ever been in France, apart from Georges Cziffra”, writes Alain Lompech in The Great Pianists of the 20th Century (Buchet-Chastel, 2012).
The introductory discussion, on the set of “Rembob’INA”, emphasizes the “excesses” of Samson François. He could be uneven on stage (“He took each concert as an adventure of which he did not know the outcome,” writes Lompech) but, insisted his widow, Josette Samson François, he never played drunk in public.
However, the paradoxes and less glorious character traits of this man – who looked, spoke and spoke like a reactionary decadentist – are not mentioned. And even less by the guests received, in 1995, by Eve Ruggieri in this rebroadcast “Musiques au coeur”: her student Bruno Rigutto, her friends the director Claude Santelli and the composer and critic of Le Figaro Pierre Petit.
Eve Ruggieri was already making extensive use of the archives of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA), co-producer of Patrick Cohen’s show: we see Samson François playing and speaking, but also Marguerite Long, his teacher, filmed in 1966 – the year of his death –, by Santelli. So that, through the medium of television archives using television archives, this number of “Rembob’INA” produces a dizzying mise en abyme effect.
“One of the golden ages of television”
The third part of the program also severely puts into perspective the presence of classical music today on the screens, recalling what Richard Poirot, editor-in-chief at the INA, calls one of the “ages of gold of French television”: in 1970, every Wednesday evening was celebrated with great pomp the bicentenary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven (whom Samson François hardly liked, who described him as “the first radical-socialist”…).
Richard Poirot takes the opportunity, with good reason, to pay a just tribute to Pierre Vozlinsky, who was the producer of the series, while he was head of the music department on television. Because this position, it is hard to believe, really existed – and by “music”, we did not then mean “variety”…
Without going back to the time when Pierre Petit hosted, on the piano, a classical music show, on Sunday afternoons, on Antenne 2, between “L’Ecole des fans”, by Jacques Martin, and the “Muppet Show”, we can remember that we could also see, in the past, on public television channels, portraits of living composers: when was the last time that Arte offered such a thing?
France Télévisions even had the luxury of putting Eve Ruggieri in competition with Alain Duault, who had his own show on France 3 (from 1987 to 2001), while Arte devoted a weekly evening (“Musica”) to classical music… Not only does all this no longer exist, but it has not been replaced. What Eve Ruggieri underlines, politely, but firmly, at the end of “Rembob’INA”.
