A baroque week around the world of the sacred

Nestled in the French alpine pastures near the Italian border, the Valloire Baroque Festival has, since its inception in 2010, built its program around a different theme each year. After exploring Baroque pastoral in its previous edition, the 2025 festival turns its focus to “the sacred world”—an opportunity to highlight both the natural and cultural heritage of Valloire and to reaffirm the festival’s ecological commitment. A conversation with Gaël de Kerret, artistic director of the festival. 

This year’s theme is “the sacred world.” What do you mean by that, and why choose this topic? 

Gaël de Kerret: Since it was founded in 2010, the festival’s identity has been closely tied to its annual theme. That could be a composer, like Monteverdi, a location, such as Versailles, or even a particular kind of musician—say, countertenors. Last year, the focus was Baroque pastoral. This year, we’re turning to the other side of that world: the sacred. I think of the two magnificent globes kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, commissioned by Louis XIV—one terrestrial, representing nature, and one celestial, which could be seen as evoking the sacred world. In our view, the sacred doesn’t stop at religion. On the contrary, it encompasses what remains unknown to us. Scientists today are increasingly recognizing this—especially when they observe how many physical laws seem to contradict one another (for example, universal gravitation and quantum mechanics) and yet both remain valid. Why? That’s where physicists begin to speak of the sacred. It’s the awareness of another side of the world, of a mystery that we’ll never fully understand. So, the sacred world is not the religious world, but the world of the unknown—what we’ve projected onto the heavens, onto God. It gives meaning to our lives. Every composer has their own version of the sacred, and each artist brings their own perspective on it. 

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