It was an exquisite moment. Because in La Roque-d’Anthéron there are not only the majestic interpreters playing under the majestic trees of the park the majestic masterpieces of the repertoire to the sound of majestic cicadas. There are delicious evenings, sometimes elsewhere, where great pianists -Luisada is one of them- mix their passions, here musical and cinematographic. And when they do it, like Luisada, on the theme of childhood lost… and found, it is, despite the technical problems, an evening of absolute grace.
Luisada storyteller and pianist C) Pierre Morales
Luisada, pianist and cinephile
The idea is so simple that one wonders how others have not had it. But it is perhaps necessary – and the artists, contrary to what one might think, are not necessarily in this spirit – to be multi-faceted, although the music is part of the very essence of cinema. But there, it is about something else: to seek in the films the pieces of piano which marked the spirits, in any case that of the small Jean-Marc since the most recent film which closes this course of an evening is the manhattan by Woody Allen in 1979 -Luisada was 21 years old.
Cinematic quiz on classic songs
And of course there are very many of them, the classic pieces that have passed down to posterity among film buffs, but they are often vocal or symphonic, because film music itself (and by its great composers, from Michel Legrand to John Williams, from Nino Rota to Maurice Jaubert, not to mention Prokofiev, Korngold or Shostakovich) often is. The adagio of 21st concerto of Mozart, the air of The Wally by Catalani, the 2nd Trio of Schubert, the 1st violin concerto of Szymanowski, the 7th symphony by Bruckner, Thus spake Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, the 5th symphony by Beethoven (same review by Walter Carlos, now Wendy): we dug into our memory, without concern for completeness and in order therefore, to save you searching: Elvira Madigan by Bo Widerberg Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix Barry Lindon by Stanley KubrickThe Ladies of Wilko by Andrzej Wajda, Senso by Luchino Visconti, 2001, a space odyssey by Stanley Kubrick or Clockwork Orange of the same.
Under the cypresses C) Pierre Morales
The bare frame of a village house
Or, again in the chamber music register, the admirable A heart in Winter by Claude Sautet -Daniel Auteuil unable to respond to the burning love of Emmanuelle Béart to the sound of Sonata for violin and cello by Ravel. And isn’t it the 1st Quartet with piano of Brahms which accompanies the enigma of Peril in the house by Michel Deville (Nicole Garcia, Christophe Malavoy, Michel Piccoli and Anemone, in a very surprising role)?
That is to say that it was perhaps necessary to be fully cinephile… and music lover (which is deeply our case) to taste like a madeleine of Proust the delicious evening offered by Luisada. And already in a “decentralized” setting compared to La Roque-d’Anthéron: in the Alpilles, the village of Eygalières, that, we were told, those who are tired of the “bling-bling” side of Luberon have joined, like Hugh Grant or Fabrice Luchini (but we haven’t seen them) We’re not far from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Les Baux; and moreover incredibly BOBO (ah! ah!) is Eygalières. But… imagine a large lawn, in the background a village house without plaster, the bare stone, the impeccable tiles, pretty shutters between gray and green against the light blue of the sky, because softened by the shadow of the cypress.
Luisada; and Anna Karina in “Rendez-vous à Bray” C) Pierre Morales
Mozart among the cacti
And a Luisada which -this was the real “plus” of the evening-, starting with a few notes by Nino Rota on the poster for The good life (projection of photos in front of us during the music), in order to remind us that film music has also produced geniuses who have left their mark on cinema so well that we have forgotten that they have done anything else, and that t is the case of Rota, a Luisada therefore who begins by telling us… a little boy named Jean-Marc (only son?) whose parents, in the good but undoubtedly peaceful town of Alès, inveterate cinephiles, took very early the son at the cinema of the corner, which did not prevent them from nourishing films diffused on the some television channels (There was the famous white square, which was a rectangle, and then I was sent to bed but my parents knew perfectly well that I continued to look through the keyhole!) Thus, as a prelude, this Fantasy K.397 of Mozart, so beautiful,so tragic and so strange, she comes… from a western by John Huston, The wind from the plain, with Audrey Hepburn and Burt Lancaster, the latter offering a pianoforte (!) to his mother played by the great silent actress, Lilian Gish (but, dear Jean-Marc, she had returned to the fore a few years earlier with the hunter’s night) And Gish who hastens to play Mozart’s Fantasy in the middle of the cacti.
The strangeness by letters of the “Great War”
A first awakening. And the cinephiles that we are (from the same generation as Luisada, and nourished like him by our first favorites as young adults at the same time) give him thanks for having brought to light two splendors, one of which is a little forgotten, which he accompanied by Brahms and Chopin. Incidentally, it is pointed out that there could be no frustration for the music lover who heard the full entirety of the works.
Jeanne Moreau (“Les amants”) and the pianist C) Pierre Morales
So little Jean-Marc was sent to England to continue his music studies. He is eleven or twelve years old, he is bored, the first months are difficult and mum, in her role as mum, sends him ten letters a week. Not less. But where she speaks to him… cinema. Films that she has seen, that he will see next. Whose See you in Bray, by Belgian director André Delvaux, based on a (strange) short story by Julien Gracq. The disturbing meeting of a reformed young man (it’s the war of 14) and a servant in a large isolated house where they are waiting for the owner of the place. To the sound of this fleeting music of the last Brahms, the intermezzi from opus 117. The confrontation of Anna Karina, enigmatic beauty (She had just done Pierrot le fou) and the young Franco-German leader of the time, Mathieu Carrière. And on the photos that scroll by (where we also see the very young Bulle Ogier) our personal memory that we never had (and we will have) so well rendered the atmosphere of this war on the side of the rear , like the greatest pages of Proust devoted to him in Recovered time.
Chopin… all the way
The Chopin is that of Bergman’s most beautiful film, Cris et Chuchotements. Two sisters and a servant watch over a dying third sister (sublime images of this symphony of red like blood scroll by) who remembers her youth, playing (the actress was Harriet Andersson, who had made a scandal with Monica of the same Bergman, young girl proud of her body) the most beautiful mazurka of Chopin (opus 17 n° 4) But there is also, adds Luisadathe kitchissime Chopin, often Hollywood, as in A song to remember (The Song of Remembrance in French, by Charles Vidor, 1945), that had seen at the Records of the screen. George Sand was embodied by the much too beautiful Merle Oberon, Chopin by Cornel Wilde, a bodybuilder, because we know that Chopin, poor thing, was an ancestor of Schwarzenegger!
Luisada in front of “Cris et chuchotements” by Bergman C) Pierre Morales
Jeanne Moreau in “gourgandine”
The Mazurka, she was played in the film by Bergman’s wife, Käbi Laretei, who during her studies was in the same class as Alfred Brendel and Paul Badura-Skoda, her teachers. An excellent pianist, Brendel said, but obviously who must have faded into the shadow of the great man… Luisada, previously, had taken a more sulphurous detour with The lovers by Louis Malle accompanied by the 1st String Sextet of Brahms, at the very time when Françoise Sagan was wondering if we liked this one. The story of Jeanne Moreau, a grand bourgeoise discovering pleasure in the arms of a meeting to the point of leaving her husband and children in her designer suit (ah! Moreau in a “little black dress” and a necklace of three rows of pearls, and voluptuously kissing the foot of the actor Jean-Marc Bory), well justified (supporting photos without these being among the most “daring”) that my bourgeois grandmother (personal memory) had always treated Moreau of naughty…
Visconti and Mahler, Woody Allen and Gershwin
Louis Malle was himself from the upper middle class. The dialogues were by Louise de Vilmorin, which is to say that in their circles stories of this kind must have occurred. Brahms had made a piano version of this sextet piece (the slow movement), which allowed Luisada to play it. As he could thanks to Alexandre Tharaud who signed (for his use?), a beautiful version of the Adagietto of the 5th symphony of Mahler used by Visconti for Death in Venice. Visconti had given Dirk Bogarde the head of the musician, which had caused a scandal, Bogarde falling into a sort of fascination, perhaps amorous, in the face of an adolescent ephebe.
Luisada, Helmut Berger and Romy Schneider C) Pierre Morales
We had heard before that Elegy of Wagner rediscovered by Visconti himself and who, ten years before the opera, was already developing the leitmotif of Tristan and Isolda (a motionless photo of Ludwig showed us Helmut Berger and Romy Schneider dazzling with beauty) And we ended with the very difficult version of Gershwin himself (because he mixes the piano part and the orchestral part… but on the only piano) of the Rhapsody in blue, tribute to manhattan of Woody Allen where, at the turn of another photo, we remembered that it was almost the beginnings of Meryl Streep.
Luisada’s “lost time”. And found?
It was finished. After technical problems (Luisada playing in the dark, a projector blinding the spectators then starting to spin like a girandole, a photo of Ludwig to the music of Death in Venice), yes, it was over but we would have continued. And Luisada too. There will be a CD. There will be, we hope, a volume 2. There could also be a story of this childhood immersed in cinema and music.
Jean-Marc against Woody C) Pierre Morales
Because before leaving, the pianist evoked again, this time, the REAL musicians of cinema: one of the last pieces of Nino Rota for the casanova by Fellini. And this little room for Diva by Vladimir Cosma (Sounds like Satie but better) where, of course, Luisada causes a Oh! outraged by a fervent satienne. But he spoke above all, of the film The Sting (L’Arnaque in French), not the famous rag of Scott Joplin but another, Sun, of the same, which we hear just before Redford is murdered. But this “Sun” has yet another resonance for me because The Sting was the last film I saw with my parents. Shortly after they were going to divorce… And the young Luisada take off in Paris.
A form of Cinema Paradiso for the pianist.
At the cinema tonight… Works by Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Wagner, Mahler/ Tharaud, Gershwin. And Nino Rota, Vladimir Cosma, Scott Joplin as surprise guests. Espace Etienne-Vatelot in Eygalières (13) on July 29.