Albert Calvayrac

Albert Calvayrac was born in 1934 in Conques sur Orbiel, a little village in the south of France near the well known town of Carcassonne. At the age of seven he was intrigued to find an old tuba in his parents’ attic and asked his father to let him hear what it sounded like. He was delighted by the result and immediately wanted to learn to play it himself. As all this took place in wartime, and there was no music in such an isolated spot, it was his father, an amateur musician, who taught him the rudiments of music. He began playing at the “Musical Circle of Conques”, a wind band formed by the village amateur musicians at the time of the liberation. Monsieur Izard taught him, as well as all the other instruments. At first he played an alto or tenor horn in E♭, that being the only instrument still available, and then his father gave him a cornet. Such was his passion for this instrument that his parents sent him “to town” to Monsieur Bocquet, a most talented teacher who gave him his first cornet lessons. He was soon able to play the well known cornet solos such as Fête militaire by Alexandre Petit, Bellos Mountagnos, the Carnaval de Venise etc.

At Monsieur Bocquet’s insistence he was sent by his parents at the age of fourteen to the Toulouse Conservatoire to study with Professor Dejean. Although he worked hard for three years, he still failed the entrance competition for the Paris Conservatoire. He went back to Toulouse to study with Yves Sirven, a brilliant young trumpeter and pupil of Foveau, and the following year (1952) he was accepted by the Paris Conservatoire to study with the great Raymond Sabarich, who helped him to win first prize for cornet in 1953.

“It was then that a strange thing happened. For me, changing from cornet to trumpet was a real disaster. I was accepted for the trumpet class in 1954 and there the example of other pupils playing high and loud drove me to do the same — one had to, in order to be first! I did not understand any of the teacher’s advice and the more I worked the worse it was and the unhappier I became, until the day when, after a dreadful failure at an end-of-year competition (1955), I decided to change career — immediately! No more trumpet, no more music; I would be a farm worker, and be happy.”