Journeau at the annual Versailles Music festival

If you are a tourist visiting Versailles, just pay a visit to the beautifully decorated Great Hall on the first floor (free entrance) and sit one hour to discover the "Alborda" Orchestra of the Versailles Conservatory of Music, directed by Jean-Pierre Lagard. You will listen to orchestra works by Shubert, Grieg, Journeau (1898-1999).

The orchestra work by Journeau has been composed in Normandy, in the "Ecole des Roches", formerly a brilliant private School for boys (and a very few girls, such as the future wife of the composer) with an English spirit at the time emphasizing sport, handworks, languages, freeness, honesty,responsibility, social behaviour and a sort of family life with Heads and teachers, pupils being divided with them in various houses in the open country with no walls at all and bearing names like "Le Vallon", "Les Pins", "La Guichardière", "Les Champs"...This last house was the very place where the composer wrote "Midi aux champs", a work dedicated to a nice country landscape.