At Abbesses, Strands by Jérôme Combier weaves its sonic web

For this last concert of the year of the Festival d’Automne at the Théâtre des Abbesses, the anticipated creation of Jérôme Combier is displayed within a program on the line, without change of stage and magnified by the play of lights.

The instrumental installation is left in the shadows during the first part of the concert which features Multilaterale flautist Matteo Cesari, who connects three works for solo flute with astonishing mastery. Cordelia of the Clouds by Jérôme Combier (2003) praises fragility, with lines that fragment, sounds that fluctuate in quarter tones and sounds filtered through playing modes (whistle tone). Except that the breath that generates it is of a staggering vitality, that which Matteo Cesari deploys to relaunch each new beginning.

The interpreter has taken his piccolo and turns his back to us in Ianus by the Spaniard Alberto Posadas, a piece given as a world premiere. With Ianus (variant of Janus), the two-headed god, it is a question of looking forward and backward which embodies the position of the performer and which the composer translates in terms of musical writing: doubling of the line, echo, bikinipassage from one range to another, transformation from one figure to another… To our knowledge, never before has a piccolo emitted such a richness of propositions: under the fingers of the flautist, the high notes are of a rare purity and intonation of great finesse on an instrument that can easily become shrill. His piccolo has the agility of a bird; he coos, chirps, quivers, twirls, without ever tiring out. He is even more eloquent when the flutist turns around, three-quarters of the way through the work, this time to play facing the audience.

Without stamp (tonlos), Venus that the Graces flower her (the title is already music!) by Salvatore Sciarrino, is the obverse of Ianus. The piece is pure energy, the expression of “ch’i” for followers of Taoism. The flautist’s breathing is accompanied by the soft sound of the keys of the instrument operated with the fingers: the virtuoso piece is intended to be curative, soothing many ailments, according to Sciarrino and the medicine of the ancients…

Shadowland by Jérôme Combier

From solo to ensemble, the transition is fluid and rapid. The stage lights up, revealing the rich instrumental device and the presence of ropes stretched obliquely from the hangers. Strands, the title of the new piece by Jérôme Combier for seven instrumentalists (the musicians of the Multilateral ensemble) and electronics, translates as “threads”, like those of the cobwebs of the Argentinian visual artist Tomás Saraceno which are at the origin of the sound project. Two giant thunder plates are suspended at the back of the stage while the percussion set continues with another slightly convex metal surface placed on two supports that the percussionist Hélène Colombotti, in great demand this evening, will resonate solo. The instrumental register leans towards the serious, from the viola to the double bass: “(…) because they have the shadow of the abyss (…)”, subtitles the composer. Neither flute nor violin but a very active harp and piano. Conducted with as much flexibility as precision by Rémi Durupt, the music that is heard is impalpable, with its elvish figures which disappear as soon as they are drawn; they nonetheless nourish a continuous, capricious and fanciful flow, with its accelerations, disruptions and bursts of lyricism, between furtive flashes and deep ultrablacks. The space gradually opens up where other lines unfold with the microtonal inflections of a distant Orient. The arrival of the marimba and its woody sounds texture the sound flow in a “struck” time, in the words of the composer. The light intensity declines while Lise Baudoin (pianist) and Hélène Colombotti, styluses in hand, move towards the thunder plates to generate “soft and dark” resonances on these two metallic surfaces, via the electronic device. The moment is eminently poetic and out of frame… Returning to her piano, Lise Baudoin begins to pull threads between the strings of her instrument, a mode of playing which contaminates all stringed instruments. Then, in the last minutes of the work, a sound with incredible grain builds up, a very impressive “migalomorphic” resonance to which the electronics give an almost haptic scale and materiality.

Photographic credit: © Ensemble Multilérale

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