“At the Toulouse Stadium, I sang in the locker room”

My greatest happiness is when a spectator says to me after a performance: “I came to see the former rugby player and I left having seen the artist. » At the beginning, I somewhat denied my past as a rugby player which stuck to my skin. That’s why I put a certain pressure on myself when I had to go on stage. I always had this search for legitimacy and irreproachability. This was still the case during my last lyrical performance, Belcantor. At the time, I was working with the director Patrick Jourdain, who wrote all my texts for me. He kept repeating to me: “You don’t have to ask permission to be on stage. »

As a child, I didn’t take singing lessons and I never held it against my parents, because I was an electric battery. I already had to channel my energy into sport, doing judo, football and then rugby. But I had a need to sing: when I went to my grandmother’s house in San Miguel de Tucuman, in the northwest of Argentina, I sang folk songs loudly on the bus. I also sang in my school choir. I wonder where this passion comes from, because I don’t come from a family of musicians. My father listened to the radio and tango all the time, maybe that’s what ended up influencing me.

“A Diamond in the Rough”

It is by watching an advertisement where we saw Maradona during the 1990 Football World Cup, which broadcast Funiculi funicula, a Neapolitan song, that I discovered this register. I started to take an interest in Pavarotti, the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. I decided to take singing and music theory lessons when I was playing for Agen. “You are a rough diamond, now you have to polish it”, my teacher, Jean-François Gardeil, told me. At that time, he offered me to work with him in New York. But fate decided otherwise: I had a proposal from Stade Toulouse.

In rugby, we room a lot. I hummed in the locker room, and people said to me: “How are you, Castafiore? » I kept zigzagging between rugby and the conservatory, where I was a student of mezzo-soprano Jane Berbié, an incredible experience. But I could not accept all artistic projects. A choice had to be made. Stopping rugby in 2008, at the age of 37, was thoughtful.

When I participated in the M6 ​​program “La France a unincredible talent”, in 2018, I bet everything on laughter by singing a bawdy song, The little man in mousse, by Patrick Sébastien, in a lyrical version. I was eliminated in the semi-finals but I proved what I was worth as a baritone. That’s when I built my identity as an opera singer, which is based in particular on humor. My greatest achievement, however, is to have previously been able to create my own show, Cafe Tangoin 2013.

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