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Her performance of Immer, a solo piece for cello by Pascal Dusapin, at the opening of Radio France's Présences festival*, impressed us greatly. Sonia Wieder Atherton returns to the stage with organist Bernard Foccroulle in a concert featuring three world premieres in solo and duo.
It is the Grenzing organ, whose console is enthroned on the stage of the Auditorium of the "Maison ronde", that first resounds under the expert fingers of Bernard Foccroulle. He has chosen to perform two tientos by the Spaniard Correa de Arauxo (1584-1654), pieces written at the dawn of the baroque period. They allow the instrumentalist to shine through the increasingly alert variations of a starting theme, letting us appreciate the variety of reed stops of this superb instrument. The instrument is highlighted in a completely different way in Fantasia by the British composer Jonathan Harvey (who died in 2012), whose exploratory writing explodes the space, giving the listener, who is a little bewildered, few reference points.
Nothing of the sort with Invece (" contrary to "), one of the solo pieces for cello by Pascal Dusapin, the "hero" of this 31st edition of Présences, presented from February 2 to 7, with nineteen pieces on the programme. A privileged interpreter of the composer she has known for a long time, Sonia Wieder-Atherton once again seizes us in Invece, a piece that calls for the energy of a gesture that harps on, digs into, and shapes the sound - one thinks of Giacinto Scelsi - in a tense and obsessive quest whose urgency the cellist conveys.
Pascal Dusapin hesitated for a long time to write for the organ, "the instrument of failure" as he likes to say, which he discovered in his teens and kept out of the compositional field for a long time. In 2008, Memory responded to a pressing request from Bernard Foccroulle. The work is a tribute to Ray Manzarek, pianist of the Doors, the mythical rock band of the 60s, where each of the "voices" (three in total) takes turns to play a solo, including the pedalboard, on the rhythm'n'blues model.
The investigation is more greedy and adventurous in T Rex with its enigmatic title by the Serbian composer Anna Sokoloviċ, who is also approaching the organ for the first time: contrasting sequences, vigorous rhythms and colourful figures are superbly rendered by Bernard Foccroulle, who seems to have a good grasp of this incomparably rich instrument.
It is a duet for organ and cello that has been commissioned from our doyenne Betsy Jolas, whose two world premieres were featured at Présences: the title, Musique d'autres jours , echoes Musique de jour , a piece for solo organ already written for Bernard Foccroulle in 1976. In a very theatrical way, the composer imagines a conversation for two, with a back and forth from one speaker to the other, in registers that merge and a mutual listening. The writing is elegant and feline, which we follow step by step in its facetious twists and turns.
Organist and composer, Bernard Foccroulle, who was, let us remember, director of great institutions such as La Monnaie in Brussels and the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, also associates the organ and the cello in Elegy for Trisha, in homage to the great American choreographer Trisha Brown who died in 2017: music of gestures linking the two sound instances in a common energy and a sound complementarity. The slightly winding trajectory seems to weave a narrative weave peppered with virtuoso passages and sonic discoveries. A beautiful complicity is established between our two interpreters, proof that the organ, dedicated to great thunderings, can also claim to be more intimate.
For the pleasure of the ears and eyes, Immer, Sonia Wieder-Atherton, piece for solo cello by Pascal Dusapin,
Michèle Tosi
