Getting young people to come to concerts, and to do so finding a welcoming venue and content that attracts them, is the challenge Laurent Jacquier set himself when he founded his Marathon festival, which has played to sold-out crowds every year since 2014.  

The annual rendezvous is at La Gaîté Lyrique, with six hours of non-stop music (from 6.30pm to 12.30am), taking the audience from one room to the next, alternating between stages in an impeccable fade-out. Laurent Jacquier 's artistic proposal is plural, where the electrified world of improvised music rubs shoulders with acoustic instruments and the more written pages of music. Whatever it is, it's heard standing up, glass in hand, or not, as the case may be.

At 6:30 p.m. sharp, pianist Trami Nguyen (pianist with the Links ensemble) welcomes us to the historic Foyer and its elegant moldings, where she has just begun to play: the poetic horizon of her program is drawn by the aquatic element, starting with Maurice Ravel's Jeux d'eau and then Une barque sur l'océan, the third piece in the Miroirs cycle , allowing us to appreciate the fluidity and elegance of the pianist's gesture in the generous acoustics of this beautiful space. She ends this (too) short sequence with Ligeti's Cordes à vide , Etude 2 from the first Book, whose rhythmic and harmonic wiggles prolong the swaying movement of the Ravelian piano. Keyboard playing is more muscular, and the clarinet is tinged with the colors of klezmer music in the duo YOM (alias Guillaume Humery) and Léo Jassef set up in the same Foyer a few moments later. Their improvised music draws on the repertoire of Eastern music, between nostalgic outpourings and energetic rhythms. YOM's long, twirling, breathless cadenza is a measure of the clarinetist's virtuosic mastery, which is duly applauded.

DJ Joakim 's stage-side installation requires the space of the Grande Salle and all four sides of the wall for his immersive audio-visual show at the crossroads of worlds, "a skilful blend of vibrations, frequencies and pulsations", writes the multi-talented artist: there's no title for this proposition, but a low-voltage sound universe, blending field recording, instrumental sounds and synthesized materials. The front wall loops a montage of images as brief as they are disparate, while the side walls feature the animal kingdom and species of all kinds. More enigmatically, the back wall also displays text that resonates with the DJ's commitment to the environment.

The Cabaret Contemporain that follows has taken over the stage and multiplied the decibels: the ever-active group returns with dance music whose five instrumentalists - electric guitar and bass, piano, synthesizer/sampler and percussion - maintain the flow of sound with a galvanizing rhythmic frenzy and an ever-sharpening search for color, particularly that of the piano, played in the strings with that repetitive, haunting gesture that leads to trance.

TheLinks ensemble- pianos, percussion and digital keyboards - is scheduled to perform in the Grande Salle at 10pm. They have set up in the center of the space, so as to be surrounded by the audience. Laurent Durupt and Trami Nguyen face each other, hyper-concentrated and imperturbable, in Piano Phase by Steve Reich. The piece (1967) by the American minimalist was one of the composer's first attempts at instrumental writing, when he decided to test his phasing/dephasing procedures with acoustic instruments. The two pianos begin in unison, then gradually become desynchronized, giving rise to all kinds of rhythmic figures, unwritten in the score, in an incessant, spellbinding movement of transformation. Much less well known, but all the more striking, is the piece Proverba more recent work (1995), takes Reich's aesthetic to new horizons. The piece features the singers of Sequenza 9.3 (three sopranos and two tenors), two synthesizers and two vibraphones. A devotee of early music, Reich turns to the first polyphonies of the Middle Ages, drawing directly on the model of Pérotin's four-voice organum, from which he retains the spirit if not the letter: held notes (instrumental or vocal) on which more animated figures are inscribed, sung or relayed by the two vibraphones. Rémi Durupt is the conductor, fine-tuning the mechanisms of this beautiful sound architecture. Sequenza 9.3's pure vocals and instrumental arrangement are equally seductive, and are listened to with the same inquisitive attention by the audience, who may be more bewildered, but are equally won over by the excellence of the sound realization.

The percussion duo Ding Dong (a.k.a. Cosmic Neman and Guillaume Quéméré Lantonnet), whose exploratory instrumental sets in the Foyer Moderne would have been expected to show off their full potential, were less appealing. WhileAlexandre Bazin 's electroacoustic performance suffers from the ambient noise of this same Foyer, where the entire audience converges, Neel and Donato Dozzy, alias Voices From the Lake, now regulars on marathon programs, hold our full attention. Using smoke machines to blur the edges of the stage in the Grande Salle, the two sound artists gradually win over their audience, who are carried away by the rhythm of their "ambient music" - stretched time and chiselled sound figures - which, as Brian Eno explains, "can be actively listened to or ignored", at the late hour of the performance that brings this Grand soir to a close.

Michèle Tosi

Paris, Gaîté Lyrique, 3-12-2022
Marathon!
With : Trami Nguyen (Maurice Ravel and György Ligeti); DJ Joakim; Yom and Léo Jassef (piano and clarinet); Cabaret Contemporain; Ding Dong; Ensemble Links and Sequenza 9.3 (Steve Reich); Alexandre Bazin; Voices from The Lake.

Photos © retross.e