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With or without loss of control, EnTrance is the title of 2e2m's concert/disc release at La Scala Paris, the latest festive event for this ensemble founded by Paul Méfano in 1972, which is celebrating its half-century of existence.
On the threshold of fifty years of all-round creation, a new era is dawning for 2e2m with its young artistic director, 30-year-old Léo Margue, conductor as well as pianist, saxophonist and improviser, enthusiastically straddling genres and styles, the written and the unwritten, to open wide the floodgates of sound: witness the evening's program - and that of the disc released on the Scala Musique label - inviting guitarist, composer and improviser Richard Comte.
The young Korean pianist Chae-Um Kim, new to the ensemble, opens the concert with the piece for piano and electronics Entr'ouvert by the Roman composer Giulia Lorusso. "The piano is my instrument [...]; I have an intimate, physical relationship with it", confides the composer, who has not chosen to perform her piece herself, as her compatriot Lara Morciano does. The challenge is to draw the listener into the heart of the instrument and its deep resonances, which the electronics hybridize and transform: "It's a search for integration and synthesis of the different listening experiences of the world in which I am integrated and which resonate within me", says Giulia. The first few minutes "work", under the performer's highly committed playing and the gradual blaze of the keyboard, but the piece doesn't live up to all its promises, particularly as regards the role of the electronics, which we would have liked to see more active and scrutinizing.
On the other hand, we marvel at Bastien David' s delicate and inventive art of bringing sound matter to life, through beams of color, multiple bursts, impact and resonance, in Instinct, a 2020 piece eminently chiseled by the conductor and his musicians. Like a living being, his music breathes, unfolds, diffracts or retracts: "I consider sound to be organic matter", as the composer, who is in residence at 2e2m this year, likes to say. He has chosen an ad hoc device, an instrumental sextet including accordion, harmonica (played by the bassoonist) and one of the six modules of his Métallophone, the 12ᵉ tone percussion instrument over three octaves that he imagined and had made, and which we were able to hear in its full resonance last May 8 at Radio France. Introduced discreetly, it iridesces the soundtrack ofInstinct, a floating layer and impalpable music of great finesse. However, the stage comes to life as it goes along, and the tone changes at the end, when one of the musicians leaves the row to give voice to the bassoonist's pipe: a theatrical dimension that our composer likes to allow within the sound dramaturgy.
During the long change of set due to the presence of electronics in Fausto Romitelli's two pieces, Léo Margue takes the microphone, inviting the president of 2e2m, and composer himself, Tomas Bordalejo, to join him. Both recall the adventurous spirit of Paul Méfano (who passed away in September 2020), the long list of composers played by the ensemble and the insane number of creations in which his wife and eminent pianist Jacqueline Méfano, present in the audience, actively participated... This is followed by a short radio piece by Pierre Juillard, a versatile artist (composer, improviser, microphonic sound collector) as well as a geographer who immortalizes Paul Méfano's voice, lively, sonorous and whimsical as was his entire being. In this finely crafted montage of intermittent sound flow, he interweaves the words of the musicians/technicians collected during the recording of the album with those of the composer, some of which resonate more than others: "Silence is the most effective music," he says in his inimitable tone.
Guitarist Richard Comte takes center stage in Fausto Romitelli's Trash TV Trance (2002). The instrument of psychedelic rock resonates with a music of distortion, feedback and abrupt breaks, which the performer seizes upon in his own way, sending out the decibels(Trash) and accusing the repetitive gesture(Trance). Her short improvisation, some Echoes of A Trance, calms things down and transitions to the next piece, allowing the conductor and orchestra to take center stage.
EnTranse (1995) is a ritualistic action for voice, instrumental ensemble and electronics, similar in many ways to the music of Claude Vivier(Bouchara, for example). The voice performs a number of ritual gestures, such as breathing in and out while swaying the head. Singer Angèle Chemin recites the 15-syllable mantra from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Romitelli breaks with linear conduct, proposing another listening experience where attention must be focused on the present moment: music without edges that unfolds in the effervescence of sound, verging on loss of control, and whose urgency and transcendental energy are communicated by the musicians of 2e2m, galvanized by Léo Margue's gesture.
Michèle Tosi
