At a French Chateau in Chantilly, a Feast of Music and Nature

Since 2021, the ornate Château de Chantilly and its imposing grounds, 30 miles north of Paris, have served as the backdrop for an intimate series of musical weekends.

The series, Les Coups de Coeur à Chantilly, is intended, in part, to promote the site’s cultural importance and natural beauty. This month, it is putting a special emphasis on nature by collaborating with one of France’s most important gardening events.

“It’s much more than a chateau,” Anne Miller, the general manager of the Château de Chantilly, whose estate encompasses about 284 acres of gardens and roughly 15,000 acres of forest, said in a recent interview.

“Here you have an art collection worthy of the Louvre,” she said from the grounds of the chateau, referring to the painting gallery of the Musée Condé, which features works by Raphael, Botticelli and Poussin, among others, and is used as one of the festival’s concert venues.

“This melding between architecture, water, nature is pretty impressive,” she added. “And you have the stables for horse lovers.”

She indicated the Grandes Écuries, an 18th-century architectural masterpiece that still hosts equestrian demonstrations under its majestic dome. During the Coups de Coeur, the stables serve as an auditorium for the event’s main concerts, with the musicians performing on a circular stage and the audience arrayed around them in stadium-style seating.

On Oct. 12 and 13, the festival is teaming up with the Journées des Plantes de Chantilly (Plant Days). The program features the Baroque orchestra Les Talens Lyriques and its conductor Christophe Rousset performing bucolic-themed works by Handel (the cantata “Apollo e Dafne”), Jean-Philippe Rameau (excerpts from the opera-ballet “Les Indes Galantes”), and the 18th-century composer Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer.

Additionally, there will be a free series of short musical programs in the chateau’s gardens. (Journées des Plantes ticket holders will receive a discount to the main Coups de Coeur concerts.)

Prince Amyn Aga Khan, a cultural philanthropist, is a leading sponsor of the Coups de Coeur and the honorary president of the Journées des Plantes. His older brother, the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Shiite Ismaili Muslims, supported the restoration of the Château de Chantilly, including the stables and the park, from 2005 to 2020 to the tune of 70 million euros (roughly $78 million). Prince Amyn was instrumental in bringing the Journées des Plantes to Chantilly from the Château de Courson, southwest of Paris, in 2015. More recently, it was his vision to bring music to Chantilly that made the Coups de Coeur a reality.

“Culture is the manifestation of our five senses,” Prince Amyn said recently at the chateau. “We all have the same five senses and most of our experiences are similar, anyway, so between sharing the senses and sharing experiences, I feel that culture is a marvelous venue for unity, understanding, collaboration, pluralism, etc.”

Prince Amyn selected the Israeli pianist Iddo Bar-Shai, a longtime friend, to run the festival. They met in Paris in 2000, when Bar-Shai performed in the inaugural Vendome Prize competition.

According to both Prince Amyn and Bar-Shai, programming a musical festival at the same time as the Journées des Plantes was always the goal. (In 2025, the festivals will again collaborate over two weekends in May and October.)

In a phone interview from Paris, Bar-Shai recalled his first visit to Chantilly, which took place during the Journées des Plantes.

“I was absolutely enchanted by the beauty of the place,” he said. “It was like a fairy tale.” Bar-Shai prepared an inaugural edition of the music festival for the spring of 2020. Those plans, however, were scuttled by the outbreak of Covid-19.

The festival debuted a year later without an audience and was streamed on classical platforms. It wasn’t until the fall of 2022 that the Coups de Coeur presented its first edition to a paying public, with a program dedicated to the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich.

“The idea was that every weekend will be a focus, kind of a carte blanche to a great artist,” Bar-Shai said about the format of his festival, whose programs are structured around individual performers or musical ensembles. “Each weekend is another world,” he added.

The Coups de Coeur maintains close relationships with many artists, including Argerich, who has performed in four of the festival’s past editions (including an 80th birthday concert program in 2021), and the British cellist Steven Isserlis, to whom a festival program was dedicated in June. Both musicians will return to the festival in April 2025.

In Chantilly, Bar-Shai said it was important for him to offer music lovers something different from the regular concert experience. “It’s discovering a much larger spectrum of these artists and in a very intimate way,” he explained.

“I felt I’ve always liked music in famous buildings,” Prince Amyn said. “I think architecture and music go together, just like music and plants. Very few people who are interested in music are uninterested in plants, and most people who are interested in plants are interested in music. So I thought that introducing music here would be a good idea.” He was speaking after a matinee concert by members of the chamber ensemble Acte[six] that had included a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s haunting Second Piano Quintet.

Hours later, a sizable audience filed into the Grandes Écuries for that weekend’s final concert. It featured the orchestra Les Siècles in a varied program that included Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 (with Bar-Shai as soloist) and the Fauré Requiem. All day long, a car show also took place on the grounds. But almost every seat in the Grandes Écuries was filled.

According to Bar-Shai, the way that architecture, nature and culture combine at the Château de Chantilly help make it a particularly inviting place for musicians to perform.

“You know, we artists also need to feel inspired,” he said.