After a moving musical, liturgical and sensory experience in the Vespers by Monteverdi, Simon Pierre-Bestion and his ensemble La Tempête return to us with Hypnos, a requiem office recreated from music from the XIand to the XXand century wreathed on occasion with bass clarinet and cornet. Again the fascination is at the rendezvous, with, above all, the musical signature of an extraordinary musician that The duty wanted to meet.
“My vision of music is like a show, a film script. I see something bigger than honoring a repertoire. I want each CD, each show to be like a story. And when it comes to telling a story, we use every possible recourse. My idea is that the clash of repertoires creates stories,” explains Simon-Pierre Bestion at Duty.
sacred ritual
Hypnos, the new album by Simon-Pierre Bestion and La Tempête, lives up to its name. This requiem ceremonial is rooted in an “Introit” by Pierre de Manchicourt (XVIand century) to achieve Song for Athens (1993) by John Tavener, passing through an old Roman song from the XIand century and one sacred song of the quarter tone craftsman Giacinto Scelsi. The Byzantine song hovers, while a bass clarinet or a cornet can fit into the volutes of sound. It is these touches of color that Simon-Pierre Bestion allows himself in his projects, which are rejected or which fascinate.
“I’ve always been overwhelmed by sacred rituals. In these rituals, there is no question of barriers between genres, repertoires or aesthetics. When I was a child and I accompanied services on the organ, a common practice in my village, I could go from a Bach piece to an improvisation and end up with a piece by César Franck. What brought people together was the fact of living together a common feeling at a specific moment,” the 33-year-old musician tells us.
“The more I developed the aspect of the sacred and the ritual in my shows, the more I developed the sensitive rapprochement of music, whatever their era. »
His vast knowledge of music comes from a certain bulimia: “I’ve always been very curious. During my studies, my teachers reproached me for not working enough technically on my pieces, because I spent my time deciphering new scores. It was the same thing in my surroundings, my encounters, with jazz and world music. I spend a lot of time listening. »
Are there any limits to openness? How does Simon-Pierre Bestion, quick, like Jordi Savall, to mix cultures, see the work of Christina Pluhar on the fusion between Purcell and jazz improvisation in the CD Music for a While of the latter? Would he go that far himself?
“It’s rather successful on her part, even if I don’t like everything she did on this CD. I am not touched, because interbreeding is brutal for me. I like encounters, but more subtle, less obvious than taking music and doing it in jazz. For example, I prefer the idea, as in Hypnos, to use a bass clarinet. The very particular sound, very jazz and improvised music, of Matteo Pastorino, I wanted to hear it in the polyphony of the Renaissance. It is a softer type of mixture. »
And Simon-Pierre Bestion adds: “When I have Schütz sing by a singer of Byzantine music, I don’t ask him to do Byzantine singing entirely, I try to find an intuitive link. » Bestion here refers to the CD Tears of Resurrection (2018), where Georges Abdallah, Byzantine cantor, works as an evangelist in the association of The story of the Resurrection of Schütz and the Fountains of Israel by Schein, the only one of his projects that left us frozen, as it is almost impossible for a German speaker to support the volapük of bazaar in which supposedly edifying texts are set out.
The chef knew nothing of our reluctance to this project, but he touched a sensitive chord by concluding: “Mixing and cultural encounters are the hardest things to achieve in the arts. I don’t feel like I succeed every time, but it’s good to try. »
Rethinking the concert
Simon-Pierre Bestion was trained as an organist. It opened new horizons for him. “On the organ, we approach all the repertoires simultaneously. My teachers gave me a taste for contemporary music and myself, when I was a child, I composed a lot. So I’ve always looked at early music with a view of the present. »
With a growing passion for the voice, consecrated by singing studies and choral direction, he came to an observation: “The voice connects eras, and vocal expression is found in all repertoires. The more I appreciated the voice, the more I realized what magnitude it could have in my life and what links it could make between all repertoires. »
This is how in 2014, Simon-Pierre Bestion wanted to bring together and merge the Europa Barocca orchestra, which he conducted from the harpsichord, and his Luce del Canto choir into a single entity that would develop this singularity. The group was called La Tempête, in accordance with the first project, Storm according to Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s argument gave me the opportunity to mix music from all centuries which have resonances and echoes between them through their craftsmanship, their imagination, their poetry. »
Thus was born a theatricalization of the music that we find in Azhar (from cantigas from Santa Maria to Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ohana, in 2017), Tears of Resurrection (Schein and Schütz, aforementioned reservations, 2018), the Vespers by Monteverdi (2019) and Hypnos.
It is by attacking the sacrosanct Vespers of Monteverdi that Simon-Pierre Bestion saw the concerts of praise turn into sometimes harsh criticism. “Initially, I was touched, because I was proud of my work and I didn’t understand. But it also means that we come to strike and bring a new vision. Early music is a field where you can take a lot of liberties, but at the same time less and less, because there are people who “know”. I confronted myself with this, since they are “knowledgeable”. »
In contrast, recent years have brought Simon-Pierre Bestion closer to Marcel Perès, a pioneer pioneer of early music, accustomed to shaking up certainties. “He often said that people get very attached to the letter. But sometimes, with the reading of the treaties, of all that is of the order of writing, it is as if 50% were missing. This missing 50% represents “the imaginary for the whole part of orality”. “So that makes semi-dead projects with semi-dead interpretations, as if it were Latin, a language that’s a bit dried out. They lack eternal life. »
Simon-Pierre Bestion’s work obviously touches the concert, which he tries to rethink. “There is a work of ritual, of office. Pagan office, certainly, but all the same quite sacred. The singers move in space and create a sound architecture that responds to the architecture of each place. I do location scouting in concert venues to look for the visual and acoustic highlights of each place, which then allows me to create a fairly simple staging. For two years, I have also been working with a lighting designer and scenographer to achieve an immersion of the spectator in a unique and sacred experience that does not at all resemble a usual concert. »
The latest project, Vespers by Rachmaninoff, next CD, to be released at the end of 2022, concert captured by television, is inspired by the Orthodox nocturnal vigils, services that occupy the whole night. “Here, it obviously doesn’t last seven hours, but Rachmaninoff’s music is compared with Greek Orthodox Byzantine songs on the same texts or texts that complete the service. That makes a 90-minute concert entirely a cappella. The central space is a stage, a place of contemplation for all the singers. The audience faces each other. We created about ten stars to represent the night with hanging lights, and the church is immersed in fog to give the feeling of Eastern church ceremonies with lots of incense. The smoke is crossed by beams. Everything is aimed at plunging the listener into a state of heightened receptivity to the music. »