Nearly 60 years after his first LP, the emblematic Breton bard Alan Stivell releases a double live album, between Celtic symphony and reinterpreted folk-rock hits, just to take “the owner's tour” of his very rich musical universe before his 81st birthday.
“Liberté – Roazhon” (released November 8) was recorded in collaboration with the Orchester national de Bretagne “but it is not necessarily a new version of the Celtic symphony” of 1979, explains Alan Stivell to AFP in his house-studio north of Rennes.
“It is a live concert recording, in symphonic formation, which was played at Liberté in Rennes and at Pleyel in Paris in 2022,” he summarizes.
Part of this double album contains extracts from the “Celtic Symphony” but also many folk or pop-rock titles which made Alan Stivell popular, such as the famous “Tri martolod”, “Brian boru” or “Pop -plinn”, rewritten for symphonic orchestrations.
“It’s symphonic, but it remains fusion music, all my music has variable geometry,” insists the artist. “We find on the album a symphony orchestra, a Celtic orchestra and choirs but there is also a bagad, soloists, an Irish bagpipe player, plus my usual rock stage musicians,” he explains.
“That's more than 60 people on stage. At first, we had simply recorded the concerts as a souvenir, to be able to listen to each other again in private. But when I heard the result, I had a utopian desire: to release an album! “.
Problem is, such a project requires “a huge budget” and his usual record company does not consider it profitable. Until Alan Stivell found the label Verycords, which took up the challenge. “It’s quite miraculous,” smiles the artist, among his precious harps.
– Less traditional than Springsteen –
For Alan Stivell, “Liberté – Roazhon” is representative of the musical journey accomplished since as a child, he fell in love with the Celtic harp that his father had designed and assembled in their Parisian apartment.
“It's a bit of a trick on the owner, a lot of aspects that are close to my heart are present on this album. There is almost a cappella singing at one point, and rock sides are still quite present on others pieces”, without forgetting the elements of “world music” that this standard bearer of Breton identity has always wanted to highlight alongside Celtic culture.
“One foot in Brittany, one foot in the rest of the world,” he sums up.
And if “there is still work to do”, the promotion of Brittany and its culture for which he fought throughout his career “has still experienced a major turnaround”, rejoices Alan Stivell.
Since the 1960s, “we have gone from an inferiority complex to what would almost be a superiority complex. There is chauvinism and all that, but we have seen a very significant evolution.”
The double album may end with a symphonic version of “Bro gozh”, Brittany's “national” anthem, but Alan Stivell affirms that in a world where he would not have felt as much the need to defend this Celtic culture, he would have “perhaps devoted himself exclusively to creation”, far from traditional themes and arrangements.
“I did this so that the Bretons would say to themselves ‘shit, we are worth more than we actually thought’ and raise their heads,” he says.
But he persists in saying that, contrary to what some people think, he is “not a traditional music artist.”
“I make music for today, using traditional themes. But if you take Bruce Springsteen, he is much closer to the American tradition than I am to the Breton tradition. And yet no one will qualify Springsteen as a traditional musician!”
