Demian Rudel Rey is not content with writing music... He is also passionate about the visual aspect and the treatment of images as well as sound. For his first chamber opera Qu'est-ce-que l'amour? which brings together singers, instrumentalists, dance, video and electronics, the young Argentine composer has created a film, the online version of which is available until 27 February at 23:59.
What is love? was premiered in a stage version at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Lyon on 30 April 2021. It is a project carried out within the framework of the postgraduate course "Artist Diploma creations " of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon, a project for which the composer says he took all the risks: in fact, the proposal is ambitious (Plato in the text), a plethoric device (acoustics and electronics, video and dance) and profuse ideas (Juliette Müller Kos's slightly "baroque" staging): This is the challenge of the show which consists, in the words of Demian Rudel Rey, in establishing "a true consonance and dialectic between music, video, electronics, dance and libretto", a slightly crazy interdisciplinary experiment carried at arm's length by a tightly knit team.
The librettist Éric Dayre (professor of comparative literature at the ENS in Lyon) recreates the atmosphere of these festive nights, animated by the oratorical jousts of the philosophical guests as recounted by Plato in his Banquet (380 BC): Socrates (the dance/Héloïse Larue) is the focus here, the one that each of them wants to seduce through their discourse on Love. From Phaedrus to Pausanias, from Aristophanes to Eryximachus, from Agathon to Diotime and Alcibiades, each one exposes his own vision of Eros, engaging in a reflection on the origins of the world and the interaction of gods and men through so many hypotheses, mythical legends and views of the mind. Re-reading and re-writing are at work in a tailor-made libretto and in a constant dialogue with the composer and his own perspectives.
Unusually today, the musicians (clarinet, saxophone, accordion/bandoneon, tuba, percussion, singers) and the conductor (the composer himself) are also actors, taking on the role of each of the philosophers and then returning to the stage with their respective instruments, solo or with their partners. In this vision of antiquity, where the shadow of Greek tragedy hovers, white dominates, in the costumes as well as in the scenic elements, were it not for the Klein blue of the lights (those of Rocío Cano Valiño) which set the floor and the back of the stage ablaze.
The opera is conceived in numbers, fluidly linking fourteen scenes in which the seven speakers/singers appear in turn (Agathon being played by a duo of soprano and baritone) in a space where the dancer (Héloïse Larue, who is also the choreographer) will move. The opening given by the instrumental ensemble and the two singers, all wearing make-up, calls on the video and the treatment of the image, which is not lacking in humour, where the eight guests of the banquet appear. They talk but also eat, fruit in this case (and each one his own), in a staging that also puts props in the hands of the characters, thyrse, mask, helmet, etc.: so many symbolic objects that can be used to make the banquet more enjoyable. These are all symbolic objects that appear on the 3D video and go back and forth between the stage and the screen in a deliberate ambiguity of the real and the virtual. This duality is also found in the music, moving between the instrumental ensemble, directed by the composer, and the electronic part, sounds fixed on a support and live processing, the sophistication of which should be emphasised.
There remains the sensitive problem of the musician-actor who certainly does not have the stature of the actor nor the skill to hold the stage alone, even if the six instrumentalists at work, all of whom must be mentioned (Sergio Menozzi, clarinet player/Alcibiade, Rémi Tripodi, saxophonist/Aristophanes, Côme Boutella, tuba player/Pausanias, Louis Domallain, percussionist/Eryximachus, Lisa Heute, accordionist-bandoneonist/Diotime, Demian Rudel Rey/Phèdre), are valiant and highly committed to their respective roles. This difficulty is not lost on the composer, who is himself confronted with the text to be spoken (which is very, very long), and who often decides to treat the spoken voice or to pass it through the loudspeakers in order to join the universe of sound and to better blend it with the electroacoustic support that accompanies it: a good decision, it seems, which deserves to be explored further and more fully assumed in order to achieve this continuum between meaning and sound, which is part of the composer's sonic utopia, and to perfect this "Borromean knot", mentioned in the video, between the different actions of the show.
Michèle Tosi