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Seizing the slightest opportunity to celebrate, Midi-Pyrénées is skilled at organising all kinds of musical and cultural activities. A selection follows.
 The list of festivals in Midi-Pyrénées is so long (there are over a hundred), that only a select few with a national or international reputation can be mentioned here. The reputation of Jazz in Marciac is such that it has become quite legendary, and stars of the jazz world, such as Keith Jarret, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Diana Reeves, Wynton Marsalis, are greeted with wild applause. Swing and enthusiasm, innovation and passion meet at Souillac en Jazz and Jazz in Montauban. Montauban swings to the rhythm of la chanson française during the popular festival Alors …chante! where rising talent and top-of-the-bill artists share the stage. In Mirande, cowboy boots and Stetsons are the order of the day at the eminently popular Country Music Festival. And every year Rio Loco fires up the banks of the Garonne during 10 days of unusual celebrations when Toulouse invites a different country (Spain, Brazil, Senegal) to participate. On the banks of the Garonne as well, Les Siestes Électroniques is a festival devoted to the new sweet and restful music, during which the experts and the less knowledgeable gather to listen to electronic music
 In a totally different key the demanding programme of the Festival Lyrique de Saint-Céré is brilliantly recreated every year. The Festival du Comminges and the Festival de Saint-Lizier glorify classical music by holding events recognised for the quality of the repertoire and the performers in the cathedrals of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges and Saint-Lizier. Sacred music reaches it peak during the Festival de Sylvanès. Nor is the city of Toulouse a stranger to the classics. Piano aux Jacobins is the first French festival entirely dedicated to the piano. And the international festival, Toulouse les Orgues, has a festive and daring programme performed on alternate evenings in Toulouse and in the region.
 There are evenings when we are led down a brilliant memorylane of multiple images, costumes, characters and lights. The show Au fil de l’eau, une histoire on the port of the Canal de Garonne in Valence d’Agen, brings together over 300 actors, great scenery and good scripts all lit up by a brilliant firework display. The natural amphitheatre in Flagnac is the setting for Hier, un village, a tableau where actors and special effects recall the joys and sorrows of this village in the Rouergue at the beginning of the 19th century. The Fêtes du Grand Fauconnier in Cordes-sur-Ciel involves a grand parade, street events and performances which capture the spirit of the bastide founded in 1222. Les Explorateurs du temps (Foix) is another event inspired by the Middle Ages, in which the rich past of the Ariège, from prehistory through the rule of the Counts of Foix to Revolution, is played out at the foot of Gaston Febus’s castle.
 During the Whitsun Feria in Vic-Fezensac, bullfighting is celebrated with all the respect, passion and sincerity owed to this long tradition. The corridas then make way to the rhythms
of the Tempo Latino Festival which blends well with the character of Vic-Fezensac. Two other unusual celebrations where the zest for life is freely expressed are the Battle of Flowers in Luchon, a fairytale event dreamed up by Edmond Rostand, and Summer in Vaour, an international festival of burlesque which sparks off peals of laughter every summer. |