Since 2017, the festival team has decided to update the initial concept, offering audiences"a journey in song through an artistic universe inspired by cross-generational artist repertoires, for Nuits qui chantent more than ever." A theme, a genre or an illustrated or inspired poetic destination that the festival explores in song, but also through exhibitions, encounters between books and songs, screenings, readings, theater and even dance. All the arts are welcome. Since then, Les Nuits de Champagne has offered the city of Troyes and the entire Champagne region a prestigious emblem in the form of headliners such as Renaud, Claude Nougaro, Charles Aznavour, Francis Cabrel, Bernard Lavilliers...
Each new edition of the festival takes on the colors of the guest of honor, programming artists with their own influences, trends and preferences. This year, the city of Troyes welcomes Les Nuits de Champagne from October 24 to 30, 2021, on the theme "De Gainsbourg à Brest, des Nuits qui chantent", with Miossec and, initially, Jane Birkin, finally absent for health reasons. The festival is an invitation to discover or rediscover the repertoire of Serge Gainsbourg, and to plunge into the heart of his sensitivity and poetry. Alternating between headliners and up-and-coming talents, the concerts will take place at various venues around the city. The highlight of the festival will be the return of the Grand Choral, a group of some 900 amateur singers from all over France and French-speaking countries, who will perform some of Serge Gainsbourg's most beautiful songs.
Nuits de Champagne program
The program for this 34th edition of the Nuits de Champagne festival is all about French chanson, with 5 days of concerts featuring the jazzy, gypsy influences of Thomas Dutronc, the electro-rock of ex-Louise Attaque Gaëtan Roussel, now an inspired pillar of the French scene, or the folk-rock of Miossec revisiting his 1st cult album "Boire", the standard-bearer of a whole generation, the elegant, melodic and powerful rap of Gaël Faye, the committed pop variety of Hoshi, the luminous vocal jazz of Madeleine Peyroux, then the current trad'folk party, women's hip hop and the grunge metal of Pogo...
And let's not forget the inauguration of Nuits de Champagne with the polyphonic creations of 700 schoolchildren from the Choeur de l'Aube, the Grand Choral, for an odyssey in song from Gainsbourg to Brest, performing twenty of his own songs in three performances.
