Listening to music outdoors is like nothing else. Here are five ways to do it close to home, from the best known to the rarest.
Something happens when music leaves four walls behind. I noticed it very early on, taking groups out walking. A tune someone whistles takes on a whole other scale among the trees, and a real voice stops you dead. Around Geneva, between the lake, the Jura and the Pays de Gex, we are lucky enough to have plenty of ways to hear music outdoors. Here are five of them, from the easiest to the most surprising.
1. Festivals and open-air stages
This is the best known way in. As soon as the good weather arrives, the region fills up with stages built in parks, in courtyards or by the water. You go for the atmosphere, for the crowd, to share a moment. It is cheerful and it is easy. The music is a collective backdrop, something for the evening to rest on. You come away happy, a bit like after a good party. It is perfect when what you want is people and energy.
2. Concerts high up, in mountain huts and summer pastures
A step further from the everyday, there are those occasions when a musician climbs up to play in a refuge or on a mountain pasture. You walk up specially, often at the end of the day, and the concert rewards the effort. The setting does half the work. The light dropping, the air cooling, the valley below. These are rare moments, but they take a bit of organising and kind weather. When it all comes together, you remember it for a long time.
3. Drinks and live music by the lake
Gentler and more urban, the drinks-and-concert format has plenty going for it. A glass, a terrace, a duo playing quietly while the sun goes down over Lake Geneva. You have not really come for the music, it keeps you company. It is pleasant, it asks nothing of you, and it is ideal for the end of a day with friends. Nature is there as a backdrop rather than at the centre, but the water and the light are usually enough to make the moment beautiful.
4. Sound walks and outdoor creations
Less common, sound walks invite you to walk while listening to a piece composed for the place itself. You move, the sound shifts with the landscape, sometimes through headphones, sometimes played live. It is an experience apart, more contemplative, and it appeals to curious minds. You are looking less for a show than for a way of seeing what is in front of you differently. It is beautiful, it is demanding, and it is like nothing else.
5. The RandOpéra: walking until you meet an opera voice
This is the one I run, so I will be straight about what makes it different. On a RandOpéra, you set off walking as normal, without knowing exactly what is waiting. And then, at a bend in the path, a lyric voice rises, with no microphone, a few metres away. The artist stays secret until the morning itself. It is not a festival and it is not a summit concert announced months ahead. It is the surprise, the shared effort, and that raw feeling that rises when the singing starts where you were not expecting it. You do not come to see a name on a poster. You come for a moment that grabs you in the gut.
What really separates them, underneath it all, is the place music holds in the outing. At a festival or over drinks, it accompanies a shared moment. At the summit and on a sound walk, it inhabits a setting. On a RandOpéra, it becomes the event, the one you did not see coming. It is for you to feel what you are short of right now. People and celebration, a big lungful of landscape, or a feeling you were not expecting.
So, the five. None is better than the others, they simply do not tell the same story. If it is surprise and feeling that draw you in, more than the crowd or a programme known in advance, the RandOpéra is probably the closest to what you are after. How it runs, the prices and its spirit are all on the RandOpéra page. And if the only thing holding you back is not knowing anything about opera, read first why you really do not need to love opera to come.
On the same theme
Fancy walking until you meet a voice?
The RandOpéra sets off from Divonne-les-Bains, as a half day or a full day, with an artist kept secret until the morning. Join the RandOpéra WhatsApp group to get the next dates before everyone else and hold on to your place.