Besancon (AFP)

The precise gesture, the concentrated gaze but with a smile for the musicians: for a long week, Victor Jacob, crossed the obstacles until reaching the final of the competition of conductors of Besançon, one of the most prestigious in the world.

On Saturday evening, after a marathon of varied and complex leadership tests, the verdict fell: the Japanese Nodoka Okisawa, 32, won the 56th International Competition of Young Conductors of the Besançon Music Festival.

But the 28-year-old Frenchman did not leave empty-handed. The jury awarded him a "special mention" unpublished to salute "the beautiful course of the young chef on the whole contest".

In the past, this event, founded in 1951, has won big names such as Gerd Albrecht, Seiji Ozawa, Michel Plasson, Zdenek Macal and Lionel Bringuier.

"More than the first prize, it's exactly what I needed: the recognition of my work, that I'm told that I'm on the right track and that I'm a good conductor", says the young Parisian.

Coming to music by the violin and the children's heart of the Radio France Masters, Victor Jacob discovered the "conductor" conductor of the British conductor Neil Thomson, his "mentor".

He graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in London with a master's degree in orchestral conducting and from the Paris National Conservatory of Music and Dance, and will take up the post of assistant conductor at the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Liege next season ( Belgium) and musical director of the Youth Orchestra of the Orchester National de Lyon.

For 270 competitors, the musical adventure of Besançon had begun and sometimes stopped six months ago, with presets in Beijing, Montreal, Berlin and Besançon. He was one of the 20 candidates selected for the competitions held from 16 to 21 September in Besançon, he began preparation "at the table".

- "Listen to the orchestra" -

"We listen to the work, we analyze the play, the orchestration, how it is written, we learn about the time," says the young man with calm and determined temperament. "That's the job of a contest: to appropriate the pieces, the languages," he says.

Before each of his passages, Victor Jacob re-reads his score one last time, dotted with red and black annotations. He walks backstage, softens his wrist, listens to the work in his head and directs an invisible orchestra band. When it comes time to get on the stage, facing the orchestra, the stage jitters to give way to music.

"The leader must have empathy, he must absorb us, make us come to him," said Philippe Cornus, percussionist of the Orchestra Victor Hugo Franche-Comté. "If he wants me to punctuate with the timpani, I need him to mark me with the body the scale with which to play".

"Victor has a great technicality, he reacts to the proposals of the orchestra and listening to take him to his ideal", appreciates the percussionist.

Already a semi-finalist of the competition in 2017, Victor Jacob has endeavored to "be in the right place, just at the magic point: always at the right degree of gift and reception".

After competing with Wagner and Ibert in the first round, Beethoven and Prokofiev in the second, the candidates led Poulenc and Mozart in the oratorio and opera events of the semifinal.

Only three of them made their way to the finals where they performed Richard Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration" (op.24) and a world-class contemporary creation by Eric Tanguy, head of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie in Saarbrücken and Kaiserslautern.

The president of the jury, Yan Pascal Tortelier, chose "a very contrasting music that reveals the different abilities of the conductors" and reveals their "ear". "You should not direct the music, but let the music direct you, that's the art of the conductor," he observes.

© 2019 AFP