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The pianist Vanessa Wagner is invited to La Grave as part of the Messiaen 2022 festival, which honors Pascal Dusapin, for whom she is a favorite performer. In the gardens of the Edelweiss hotel, facing the Meije glacier, she tells us about the deep links she has forged with the composer and his piano world, and talks about her attachment to the music of the American minimalists, which she never stops recording and which she plays in concert, alone or in duo.
Vanessa Wagner, you are a faithful participant of the Messiaen Festival in the Meije region, which this year celebrates the 30th anniversary of the composer's death. What are the works of the Master of La Grave that you particularly defend?
I have been coming to the festival since 2011, the year I played Scriabin, Murail, Debussy and three of Pascal Dusapin's Études. I have come back regularly, every two years, with several works by Messiaen: the Harawi vocal cycle sung by Karen Vourc'h, which we have toured a lot and which I love, the Visions de l'Amen for two pianos with Marie Vermeulin, the Poème pour Mi... I also have in my repertoire a dozen Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, the Petites Esquisses d'oiseaux and the Fantaisie pour violon et piano, which was performed at the beginning of this 2022 edition.
You will not be playing Messiaen's music this year, but two large-scale pieces by Pascal Dusapin that you created. How did you meet the composer?
It dates back to 1999 and was made through the intermediary of the composer Eric Tanguy , whom I knew well since our studies at the Conservatoire and who was very close to Pascal Dusapin; I had just recorded a Scriabin CD for Lyrinx that he listened to and liked very much. From that point on, a very beautiful, friendly, long-lasting and deep relationship developed, so much so that today he considers me his confidante! Pascal had a very conflicting relationship with the piano, which was not yet in his catalog, and our meeting certainly allowed him to overcome this blockage and to reconnect with an instrument he had studied, without much success, in his childhood. I had the pleasure of creating his first Etudes, which are dedicated to me, with that emotion that is always intense when it comes to giving life to music that has never been heard.
The link is both intimate and professional!
The human dimension is indeed very important in our relationship between performer and composer. I must say that I entered his sound universe almost instinctively and that I feel quite strongly his music by virtue of what binds us in life, this base of "big melancholy" which brings us together and which I totally assume.
Did you already have experience of the contemporary world before you started working on his scores?
I was already interested in creation, with this desire to escape the institution of the conservatory where I suffered a lot from the academic teaching. I began to listen to Stockhausen, Xenakis, Grisey, Berio, composers who were absent from my teaching and whom I wanted to discover. Meeting living composers such as Eric Tanguy and François Sarhan stimulated me a lot; meeting Pascal Dusapin was a determining factor.
Tonight, in the church of La Salle-Les-Alpes, you will play the complete Seven Etudes for piano. It is an interpretation that you have been maturing for some time, a music that you have totally appropriated...
Pascal's music is inhabited by a very deep melancholy but which is not despair; in the Seven Etudes, he conforms to the genre that implies research in writing and a certain virtuosity: there are three that are particularly adventurous, one of which is very difficult. They are related to the great cycle of studies of the XXᵉ or even the XIXᵉ century, where he wanted to test the technical and digital abilities of the performer even if it does not go as far as in Ligeti. The intention is not the same in Ô Mensch! where he strips the writing to the maximum by giving the text its full importance. I premiered the first Étude in 1999 at the Bouffes du Nord, then numbers 3 and 7; but I prefer to play them in their entirety, according to the dramaturgy that it draws and the harmonic ramifications that I continue to discover in the course of concerts, without fearing today to be close to silence and resonance. The more I play this music, the more I try to find the flexibility and naturalness that bring it closer to improvisation, even if everything is precisely noted. I remember Henri Dutilleux's remark, which touched me greatly, that I made this music live "between the notes". It inspired the title of my last CD Study of the Invisible . In Dusapin's writing, the way to hold the discourse and to be inhabited by each note and each space is extremely important to restore the inner flow of the discourse.
How could one best define this piano writing?
In my opinion, and after having worked a lot with singers, I would say that Pascal writes for the piano as for the voice, asking the instrumentalist to find the breath of the singer; I think that his music is at its most expressive when the piano is forgotten.
Ô Mensch! is another adventure with the baritone Georg Nigl, for whom Pascal Dusapin has already written four operas: does the piano writing remain the same?
Like Schubert's Winter Journey, to which the piece is undeniably reminiscent, O Mensch! is a very deep and desperate existential journey; Nietzsche's texts, of a completely different tenor than Müller's, were selected by Pascal Dusapin and could almost constitute a kind of intimate portrait of the composer. The work was first performed at the Bouffes du Nord in 2011 by Georg Nigl and Pascal's staging included set design, video and electronics. The artistic encounter with Nigl, an artist of extraordinary charisma, was more than positive; together we recorded the piece at Col legno.
But I am now very pleased to be performing the score again with the Australian baritone Mitch Riley, whose personality, physique and voice are totally different from Georg's. He too has created a work that is very different from Georg's. He too has created a staging of the Sidney version, with his own pianist. His appropriation of the text and his inhabited, almost expressionist manner is of such intensity that I allowed myself to be embroiled in his vision of things, while at the same time bringing this touch of melancholy, of intimacy, to a universe that is very theatrical for him. As for the piano writing, it is based on a detailed harmonic work and a dimension of timbre and sound texture that it is up to the performer to bring out. It is necessary to seek the way to make the chords sound, to model the sound and to animate a matter in its tiny variations.
I would like to talk about your foray into the music of the American minimalists, a fairly recent approach, after all, and a style of writing to which you give a new light, a new jubilation...
I started this new repertoire in 2016, the year of the release of the album Statea, meeting of the acoustic piano with the electronics of the Mexican Fernando Corona Murcof; I have never hidden my interest in sophisticated electronic music but I took quite a long time to conceive a project with them; I was afraid of the reactions of my professional environment! It's a record that worked well and marked a turning point in my career: I wanted to confront my role as a performer playing John Cage, Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, Valentin Sylvestrov, John Adams with another way of apprehending sound as Murcof knows how, with a relatively simple electronic device. I started playing the music of the minimalists at that time, even though I had known it for a long time - I loved Einstein on the Beach! -, while it was still very much despised in France. For my first solo CD, InlandI went looking for lesser known scores like those of Moondog, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch or William Susman.
Vanessa Wagner, your critically acclaimed second album, This is America, is a huge success!
It is for two pianos, with Wilhem Latchoumia, an alter ego in terms of touch and artistic sensitivity. I had long dreamed of playing Steve Reich's Piano Phase for two pianos, and we combined it with other equally frenetic and enjoyable music such as Philip Glass' Four Movements , the symphonic dances from West Side Story, and John Adams' Hallelujah Junction. My latest recording Study of the Invisible continues this investigation in the minimalist movement with the young generation of Caroline Shaw, Bryce Dessner, Peter Garland, Peteris Vasks, David Lang that I wanted to make discover to the French public. I hope to have opened doors to this music which is struggling to establish itself in France; the fact that I played it at La Roque-d'Anthéron is in itself a great success.
Does this mean that the American repertoire now occupies a predominant place in your programs?
Let's say it has a real place, but I don't forget the classics. In fact, I think that the two worlds feed each other. The American repetitives made me aware of a different temporality, opened up my playing and modified my relationship to the great repertoire, which I now approach in a more relaxed way. I have just played Grieg and Tchaikovsky with the sensation of listening to myself better, of enjoying the timbre in the slow movements and of taking greater pleasure in it. There is something that has blossomed in my playing and contributes to making me love this profession more intensely: by playing Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Pärt, Dusapin and Glass at the same time, I have found the path that suits me, a saving liberation.
Interview by Michèle Tosi
