the essential
The poster is a dream: the charismatic singer of Têtes Raides has set the greatest Russian poets to music. Christian Olivier will be Thursday January 16 at the Sorano theater in Toulouse.
It’s a meeting at the top: Christian Olivier, whose commitment and love of words is well known, has selected poems by Russian authors from the so-called “silver” period – that is to say 1917 at the beginning of the 1930s –, set to music and recorded their strongest works, and developed a show, which he will present this Thursday, January 16 at the Sorano Theater, as a preamble to the “Détours de chant” festival (from January 25 to February 8).
“A visceral language”
“These are twelve poems that I know and have even known for a long time, like Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Essenin, Akhmatova, Harms, Blok and others, that my friend and translator André Markowicz introduced me to,” explains the man in the black hat. . I wasn’t very comfortable with the translation of certain poems but André pushed me to make them my own and translate them.” An album captures this collusion between Olivier’s strong voice and the terrible words of these Russian poets: “”Le ça est le ça”, released in January 2023 by Tôt ou Tard. What do they tell us, these poems written there more than a century? “They are very alive and tell us powerfully what is happening: people are crushed, they are suffocating, when they have not experienced an even more tragic fate: confinement, suicide… They are written in a visceral language in his poetry and they are created in a very rich period: theater, cinema, music, the revolution is not only political, but also cultural. There is an extraordinary energy.”
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“A poetry that resonates with today”
We can trust Christian Olivier to convey this energy, this power, on stage. Fans of Têtes Raides, of the collective Les Chats Pelés, those who saw the show “Merci Monsieur Prévert” with Yolande Moreau, in 2018 and already at the Sorano, or even its delightful rereading of Vian, know the total artistic commitment that guides all his choices. Surrounded by five musicians, Olivier will invent a unique universe with typographic images, film extracts, lights and top-notch sounds. “You have to be vigilant when you sing texts that you didn’t write,” he warns. sounds and engage the audience Above all, I made sure that the music was not too “traditional” – even if we used instruments like the accordion, the musical saw, the violin – but very current, modern, because when I bring this word on stage, its themes, the problems it shows resonate with today’s world.”
More than ever, Christian Olivier happily combines poetry and politics. “All poetry is a political act, a fight. It’s all a question of commitment, and whether these poems speak to us of love or war, commitment is the same. Poetry, in any case, is everywhere.”
