On March 7, 1983, Claude Vivier was brutally murdered in Paris and the musical world lost a composer of whom many of his peers, including Gyorgy Ligeti, recognized eminence and international reach. On Tuesday, Lorraine Vaillancourt will conduct an inaugural tribute concert New weekdemonstration of the collective Le Vivier in a nod to the “New Events” imagined by Claude Vivier, Lorraine Vaillancourt, José Evangelista and John Rea in 1978.
“It’s one of the most moving pieces of music I’ve had to conduct. However, I come from a school where it is us who work and the people who are moved. At the head of the orchestra, you have to both control and let the musicians go as far as possible, but each time, during Kopernikus, Songs for 7 female voices, Prelude for a Marco Polo Or Wo bist du Licht!Claude Vivier always ends up coming to seek me deeply, by his beauty, his light, ”says Lorraine Vaillancourt, moved before the concert on Tuesday evening.
Even if the legendary musical director of the NEM specifies that she is not the “messenger” of the new week, which will be held until March 17, his attendance at the music of his friend and colleague who has been deceased for more than 40 years is invaluable.
Visited by a muse
“Every time I think of Claude’s music, I think of the light it emanates along with a kind of sadness, of melancholy from which he did not hide. Lorraine Vaillancourt admits that her music is difficult to define: “Sometimes we are in the middle of the jungle, it’s dense, and through a very sharp break we find ourselves in the sky with a kind of lighting, by a unison, a change of radical dynamics. »
Lorraine Vaillancourt remarks that in the vocal music “supported by a complex instrumental material, there is always something which hovers and which makes one be at the same time in purity, density, violence and tenderness”.
“Claude is perhaps also, of all the composers that I have come across in my life, the image that we have of a composer visited by a muse: there are flashes in his work. He was a composer in love with his music. It wasn’t arrogance or pretentiousness: he was touched as if he hadn’t composed it. »
Among the strange characteristics of Claude Vivier’s music are the lyrics of his songs, an imaginary language. “He was a great lover of the voice, passionate and very demanding, treating the voice like an instrument. The sentences are endless, the tempos very slow: it takes lungs of steel to sing your music. His invented language says so many things. There was in him this side close to childhood; he was like a big child and had retained this naivety, openness and candor. He succeeded in putting into the mouths of the singers such touching and strong words through a language that does not exist. »
The past present
Lorraine Vaillancourt will lead on Tuesday Three arias for an imaginary opera, Bouchara as well as And I’ll see this strange town again, compositions from 1981 and 1982. “I wanted to enter the universe of his last works. But what does “last works” mean since he died so quickly? The works that are there are not testamentary; he was fully grown. By choosing them, I realized that we were still in the same years, but it was also in those years that we worked together on the New events. »
The musical director of the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne qualifies the tribute as a return to the past, “but a past that is very present”. “He was in his thirties, we were in the prime of life. He left in 1981 for this trip from which he never returned. I remember it all the better because I was pregnant. He told me: “It will be a girl”. I did not know. He never knew her. She was born in ’82 and he never came back. »
On March 7, 1983, we lost a creative genius. His murderer, sentenced to life in November 1986, was released on parole in March 2003. His name reappeared in the judicial columns in June 2009 for a new prison sentence for violence against his wife and child. The world at the time of social networks shelters in its geographical sphere a character free as air, an apologist for Putin and the “convoys of freedom”, considering that it is a “moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”. It is also that, “the past which is very present”. Not sure that humanity has gained from the change.