On February 22, the French pianist Pascal Amoyel invites music lovers and neophytes to follow him, at the Bourgie hall, On Beethoven’s footstepsa journey through the 32 sonatas seen as the composer’s diary.
In 2017, Pascal Amoyel came to Montreal to present his musical show The pianist with 50 fingers, a tribute to György Cziffra (1921-1994), who was his master. ” The pianist with 50 fingers is a sincere and moving show, very polished in the lighting”, we wrote, noting that Pascal Amoyel’s project is part of “this attempt to intelligently break the ritual of the concert” by succeeding, because “it’s very good theatre, which deserves to be toured everywhere in Quebec”.
Pascal Amoyel, who also designed The day I met Franz Liszt, is not an artist who pours into music explained to 7 to 77 year olds because there would have been a career. He is a great soloist whom we spotted 25 years ago, when a record store in Montpellier, XCP, produced his recordings dedicated to Liszt. It was at Calliope, with Chopin’s nocturnes, that he had left his first major discographic milestone.
What he does today is even greater: he invented a new genre, musical theatre. In the footsteps of Beethoven ran for 16 weeks at the Ranelagh theater in Paris. Yes, for 85 performances in one place, like a show right on Broadway, Pascal Amoyel presented the piano world of Beethoven by uniting music lovers and neophytes!
Getting into the game
“It’s a shape that I created without wanting to create a shape,” Pascal Amoyel tells us. Originally, the Festival de la Chaise-Dieu, founded by Georges Cziffra in Auvergne, had asked him to pay tribute to his master to inaugurate a Cziffra auditorium. “I couldn’t see myself coming to read a letter, so I got into the game of doing a little show where, as I had rubbed shoulders with him and we had exchanged a lot, I could confide certain things. » Thus was born The pianist with 50 fingers.
But the theatrical form was already present in Pascal Amoyel’s universe. “In fact, a few years earlier, I had designed with my spouse, Emmanuelle Bertrand, a show called Block 15 or music in resistance, directed by Jean Piat. We had discovered moving testimonies on the lives of two musicians, Simon Laks, a composer from Warsaw, and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, cellist, survivors of the death camps, who managed to survive because they were musicians. It was such a little-known part of music that we said to ourselves: “We have to be able to pass on these testimonies. And you have to find a form to do it.” The form will create the transmission belt; if you don’t have the form, the message may not be audible. »
Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel got down to writing a show. Because there were many things to say: “Not only had they been able to survive because they had found refuge in music, but in a certain way, it was necessary to look into what is meant by the word ‘culture’. ” in times of war. Culture has not eradicated barbarism: the executioner who came to cry while listening to Schubert found himself doing his job a few minutes later. How can music be a vector of so many emotions? And what is emotion in this context? »
Block 15 or music in resistance impressed Pascal Amoyel a lot. He had already worked there with Christian Fromont, who later helped him a great deal, becoming the director of his subsequent shows. ” For The pianist with 50 fingers, I intended to take an actor, but Christian told me: “You can’t take an actor on stage, because he’s the one who will say something that happened to you, and you will be at the piano.” »
Little by little, the pianist with a clearly traced career saw himself called upon to do things he would never have felt capable of: “If someone had told me in 2005-2006 that I would do musical shows while playing life of Beethoven, I would have run off saying, “That’s not me.” »
Stake dichotomy
Obviously, Pascal Amoyel can thus reach other spectators. “In the audience, there is a bit of everything, music lovers, because it remains a theatrical concert, and those who come to discover texts and listen to music. The texts are taken on board by the music; music is a kind of spark that comes to form words. Over time, Pascal Amoyel sees Cziffra spectators come to discover Liszt and Beethoven.
” In the footsteps of Beethoven, it’s a bet to tell the music differently, so that both the music lover can be interested, enter into an emotional, social, historical context and that a person who has never heard a note of Beethoven can say: “But I like this music, it touches me.” »
This dichotomy is at the heart of the issue. “It makes it difficult for me to complete the writing of a show, because the border is tenuous and sometimes I go a little too much in one direction, sometimes too much in the other. Not easy, especially since I’m not a writer: it’s a bit painful that all this comes out, but after a while, I feel like I’ve found a balance that will allow everyone to get into the evidence of this music. »
Breaking the codes also means encountering resistance. “In France, things are quite compartmentalised. Theaters program relatively little music, while concert halls do not want text. But Pascal Amoyel has found places, like the Salle Bourgie here, open to this type of experience and he is delighted with the reception of his latest show. ” It’s called The strange concert. I am passionate about magic and this show connects magic and music by seeking to explore why music touches and connects us. I think that the people who program this are people who want to open and build bridges”, tells us the one who claims to have in fact “never seen these shows as bridges”.
The Beethoven project was born in 2019. In Paris, Pascal Amoyel was able to perform just before COVID, but the tour in the provinces was very affected. The pianist’s relationship with Beethoven was initially distant: “When I was a student at the Paris Conservatory, it was not music that attracted me at first sight. I really liked Beethoven, listening to him, but I didn’t really want to play him. »
One day in a park, Pascal Amoyel heard music that fascinated him: “I wasn’t expecting anything, I had no bearings, no judgement, no a priori, this fraction of a second where you don’t put any labels and where I didn’t know it was Beethoven. What beauty, what tenderness! Shortly after, I identified Beethoven and I said to myself: “How could I miss this tenderness in this music, this obviousness?” »
He remembers: “When you are a student, our teachers unfold the prohibitions around this music. We are told, for example, “Wait until you are 30 or 40.” So we are full of apprehensions and we say to ourselves: “To raise myself to the height of this bust which contemplates me from its height, it will take me so many years.” However, in this park, on the contrary, I had the impression of the most candid evidence and I said to myself that I had missed out on so many things. »
Back home, Pascal Amoyel devours scores, especially early sonatas. “We are in the idea that the slightest strong passage in Beethoven is necessarily angry or serious. Well no: there is so much joy, jubilation. I tried to return to this moment of listening freshness to look at the sonatas like this, and I started a kind of investigation over the 32 sonatas. This investigation has taken me far enough artistically, musically, pianistically and spiritually, since Beethoven’s music is linked to the search for love that gives birth to music. »