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Leaving the stage of the Pan Piper behind, it's on the more spacious stage of the Théâtre de l'Échangeur in Bagnolet - and for four days - that the Ensemble(s) festival, assisted by students in advanced training in sound professions at the CNSMD in Paris, has set down desks and microphones for its third season. Bringing together the strengths of five ensembles, all dedicated to the music of our time, this year's festival celebrates one of the greatest figures of contemporary creation, Hugues Dufourt.
A composer as well as a philosopher and aesthetician, Hugues Dufourt worked at the CNRS, where he became director of research. A pioneer of the spectral movement and one of the leaders of the L'Itinéraire ensemble, he is involved in the integration of electronic instruments into instrumental ensembles, developing a style of writing based on research and the power of timbre, which he situates at the source of deep emotion. And that's exactly what each of the pieces on the program makes us feel.
Although the themes differ from one ensemble to the next, Hugues Dufourt's works are featured in virtually every concert: six pieces by the composer ranging from solo to ensemble, most of them closely related to painting - by Klee, Tiepolo or Matisse. However, Dufourt does not seek equivalence between pictorial colors and sonorities. His aim, he tells us, is to "get to the bottom of things", to assess the lines of force that run through the canvases (movement, tension, energy), which the music will be able to translate through its own material.
Ensemble Court-Circuit , conducted by Jean Deroyer, performs L'Afrique d'après Tiepolo (2005), the first of a series of four pieces to be assembled under the title Continents d'après Tiepolo. In 1752, Prince-Bishop Karl-Philipp von Greiffenklau commissioned the Venetian to decorate the vault of the Great Staircase at his residence in Würzburg, built by the architect Johann Balthasar Neumann. Tiepolo's "asymmetrical and turbulent perspectives" captured our composer's attention. For L'Afrique, or more precisely "the pale African sun" that strikes the composer's eye, Hugues Dufourt conceives flat tones of color, complex chords in constant metamorphosis, in smooth, unbroken time. This ecstatic, spellbinding plunge into the heart of matter is inaugurated by a grand piano solo by Jean-Marie Cottet, which immediately captivates the listener.
"I took care of harmony," he says of L'origine du monde for piano and 14 instruments, which precedes L'Afrique d'après Tiepolo by a year. The piece, conducted by Léo Warynski, brings together musicians from all five ensembles. We are seduced by the subtle integration of percussion, which initially extends and hybridizes the piano chords (Caroline Cren). The voyage is immersive, and the harmonic density carried to saturation.
Even more striking, L'atelier rouge selon Matisse (2020) is written for piano, percussion, saxophone (baritone and bass) and electric guitar, calling on the instrumentalists of the Cairn ensemble, who play here without a conductor. "[...] L'Atelier rouge is thus summed up as a great flat of pure, strident color, where the impression of depth dissipates, positional relationships are eliminated and constructional processes fail," says Hugues Dufourt of the canvas observed. "The forms of traditional discourse are thus subjected to the distorting action of the media and absorbed into another logic, that of pure tension," he explains. The musical work is harsh and beautiful, proceeding by abrupt juxtapositions of unprecedented sound complexes forging a raw material: noisy sounds of the electric guitar, multiphonics of the saxophone, play in the strings of the piano, stick scraping the pipes of the vibraphone or the support of an amplified waterphone: the last pages are no less staggering, where the tremolos of an almost aggressive vibraphone drown in their resonance the last chords of the piano.
Ensemble Nikel, Warsaw Festival, 2020
Playing and transmitting
Anxious to cross genres and generations, the festival also focuses on transmission by soliciting the writing of pedagogical pieces in partnership with Maison Lemoine, which has undertaken to publish them. Commissions covering all levels of the training curriculum have been awarded to fifteen composers in conjunction with the Conservatoires des XIᵉ et XXᵉ arrondissements and Gaëlle Belot's flute class in Ivry-sur-Seine. Two budding performers are invited to take center stage to prelude each concert, ensuring their world premiere with all the seriousness and talent of their young age: all highly appreciated nuggets, such as Violeta Cruz's Cailloux given by flutist Ève Garuchot, Mikel Urquiza 's Atelier d'Escher by pianist Gaspard Verclytte and our favorite,Aurélien Dumont's Tanukibayashi. Mélina Richard-Sarmiento plays with the head of her flute and the action of her finger in the pipe, dialoguing with the image whose short appearances the young instrumentalist regulates with her foot, as relevant as they are delightful.
World premiere
By Latvian composer Linda Leimane, Bodies. Undulations for eight instruments was commissioned by Court-Circuit (with support for the writing of original musical works) and directed by its conductor Jean Deroyer. The composer draws her inspiration from Rodin's sculpture La Porte de l'enfer, in which she seeks to translate the energy emanating from bodies. The work is based on the continuous flow of a figure, repeated over and over again and led by the piano, which renews its configurations within the various desks by permutations and interpolations of its constituent elements: a music without edge that could go on forever... but which ends up tiring. Gonzalo Joaquin Bustos, artistic director of Ensemble Sillages, takes the podium in A hug to die by Greek composer Sofia Avramidou, a piece that touches us with its fragile, sensitive textures, without fully convincing us.
Cada trozo/cada ganglio for instrumental ensemble, sampler and video by Argentine composer Fernando Garnero was commissioned by Cairn in co-production with the Académie de France à Rome-Villa Medici, where the composer was resident in 2020. First and foremost, the piece has the merit of introducing electronics and video to the stage, ingredients that are rarely used this year. The music, Garnero tells us, was conceived from Alexis Moreano-Banda's video support, images of a laundry in full operation and workers leaving their jobs. In the sampler, snatches of sounds captured in the laundry; on the score, with synthesizer, electric guitar, clarinet, cello and percussion by the Cairn ensemble - constellatory writing, crumbs of sound distributed in space by musicians very attentive to each other, the piece not being directed; and it's clear that the blend works, particularly in the central passage, with the blurred images of the workers whose dreamlike scope is reinforced by the music.
Guillaume Bourgogne, conductor of Ensemble Cairn, leads the "large ensemble" (including musicians from Multilatérale and 2e2m) in The Lincolnshire Poacher (commissioned by the Festival with support for the writing of original musical works) by Mauro Lanza, a composer who likes to work with found objects. Here, he takes an interest in the ghost radio station that broadcast coded messages in the 1960s, collecting sound material from old CDs. Voices are summoned, as are the surrounding noises, loops and various mechanisms making up a lively, whimsical sonic soil whose virtuoso, colorful aspect Guillaume Bourgogne emphasizes.
Ami...chemin....oser....vie.. . (2011) by Philippe Leroux is not a premiere, but certainly one of the most remarkable pieces of the festival, conducted by Jean Deroyer. The initial idea was to work on the plasticity of the material, before the composer learned of his brother's sudden death and turned the movement towards a certain idea of death and ceremonial: such as the gesture of raising the cello and then the other string instruments to mouth level to blow into the body. Nevertheless, we feel the pleasure of sound that generates a singular engineering of the writing, and the virtuosity with which the movement is conducted, the trajectory being punctuated by formidable solos such as that of flutist Sophie Deshayes: invention, texture and thickness to the point of saturation; the astonishing piece celebrates the energy and powers of sound.
The composer's current work is rich, including the opera L'annonce faite à Marie. L'annonce faite à Marie is on the bill at the Théâtre Graslin in Nantes from October 9, mobilizing the forces of Cairn and the direction of Guillaume Bourgogne.
Hugues Dufourt, composer and thinker of today's music, dedicated his four days to creation. Speaking to Corinne Schneider at the end of his residency, he invoked Michel Foucault to testify to the new codes of perception and practice that the Ensemble(s) festival embodies for him: this collegiality of conductors and composers in the reflection and content of a program; this placing of young people in concert situations "in the total renewal of institutional attitudes", he stresses, notably in the link that is being created between conservatories and broadcasting bodies. So much encouragement and positive vibes for a fourth season in the momentum and liveliness of creation.
Michèle Tosi
Corinne Schneider's podcasts on the net
Nothing will be lost this year when it comes to the exchanges between the composers present and festival mediator Corinne Schneider, as they were recorded in their entirety during each intermission and are the subject of podcasts (one per day) available on youtube and the festival website.
