I spent the weekend in Montpellier, a beautiful medieval city in southern France, the guest of my friend Gilles, a professor of linguistics who also happens to be a gifted amateur pianist.

We took in a lot of culture that weekend – Montpellier is home to a fine opera house, a beautiful theater, and several summertime arts festivals.

Saturday, we attended an open-air performance of Madame de Sade, a play by Yukio Mishima about how the depravities of the Marquis de Sade – her husband – affected her life and outlook. The play is wordy, certainly – the French version runs to well over 125 pages of dense text (it seemed to have been trimmed for the performed version I saw), but it's an interesting discussion of the effect of the French Revolution on private and public lives, and how the women of the era coped not only with the strictures of society, but the shifts of that society and the meaning of liberty and faithfulness in a time of unrest.

It was certainly an interesting experience for me – an American trying to learn a second language watching a play by a Japanese author translated into French. I'm glad I read the play beforehand – otherwise the torrent of words would probably have been entirely lost on me.

Sunday night Montpellier Danse hosted an interesting performance at the Opéra  Comedie of Castor & Pollux, a work by Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud. The two played the twin brothers of the myth. In the story, after Castor dies Pollux asks Zeus to let his dead brother share his own immortality (the twins had different mothers, and only one of them was immortal), so Zeus transformed them into the Gemini constellation.

The piece was performed above the audience, who watched from the floor of the stage lying on red blankets and little black pillows as the two dancers engaged in astral choreography. They were suspended via wires (think Cirque du Soleil minus the zaniness) and floated and twisted and coupled and uncoupled and soared and sank for some 40 minutes as they evoked the situation of those doomed and deathless twins. It was one of those pieces where you marvel more at the physical stamina of the dancers than the actual choreography, but I'm glad I saw it.

But for me the highlight of a delightful stay in Montpellier was Sunday afternoon, when my friend Gilles took part in an amateur musical gathering at the home of his friend Vincent Bioulès, a painter and violinist. Every week Bioulès opens his beautiful home on the outskirts of the downtown area – a five-minute walk from the new opera house – to his musician friends, and about a dozen or so string players of varying skill gather to make music.

I sat on a couch in the adjoining room and watched the group gather themselves into a sort of ad hoc ensemble on chairs arranged into a circle in a room that held not only a grand piano (a beautiful Bechstein) but a harpsichord and a glass-fronted cabinet that held several violins, ripe for the plucking. Bioulès distributed music to the musicians (he has a trove of scores; is family is musical; his father helped establish an orchestra in Montpellier), and the players settled themselves on their chairs, with their music stands positioned just so. Gilles played harpsichord.

They played Bach and Vivaldi and, just as I was slipping out to see the dance performance, they attempted a Mendelssohn sinfonia. There were false starts, after tempo changes or missed cues, but the group soldiered on. It was, of course, a throwback to an earlier era of music-making, when every home had a piano and every child in a middle-class family studied an instrument.

The sound wasn't quite up to the level of a professional orchestra, of course — how could it be? —  despite the presence of a few professional players. But what it lacked in finesse it made up for in warmth and joy. I loved being there listening to music the way it might have sounded eons ago when people actually actively played rather than merely listened while others did all the work.

It was perfect, and the flaws made the gathering more special somehow, almost heavenly. If heaven is a place where the strings sound a little sour and the beat tends to wander a bit. If heaven is a place inhabited by amateur musicians. For a few hours on a steamy Sunday, it felt like heaven to me.