The history of music is full of original scores born from the encounter between a composer and a performer. If this type of collaboration still gives rise to works outside the norm, it sometimes goes so far as to condition entire programs that only the record can appreciate in the form of a journey with multiple correspondences.
This was the case, in 2019, for The Ariadne’s thread (Evidence Classics), magnificent CD in which the violinist Marianne Piketty and the composer Axel Nante unrolled with the art of an illusionist the inexhaustible ball of concertos by Pietro Locatelli. Three years later, the long-term soloist and the young Argentinian invite us to a new discographic adventure (through the same label) where the “recomposed” past (arrangements by Axel Nante) and the unpublished present (Under the starcreation of the 30-year-old composer) illuminate each other in a repeated exploration of the night.
under the star brings together, in fact, eight pages, from very varied periods and durations, which all relate to the nocturnal domain. Of a sad evening1918), by Lili Boulanger, opens the panorama in a spectacular way. This short piece, originally for violin and piano, is projected here, like the shadow of a silhouette on a wall, with striking density and dramatic force. Sensitivity can be perceived there on the surface of the strings, those of a cello solo resembling a swan song and those of a collective, The Ideal Concert, whose incandescent interpretation serves the composer’s funeral remarks magnificently. His flame burns here and there with the energy of despair, but it is doomed to extinction.
Voluptuous contortions
A few weeks later, Lili Boulanger will die at the age of 24. Much less gloomy is the horizon of the famous violin concerto, RV 439, subtitled ” The night “, by Antonio Vivaldi, restored for the occasion with the ornamentation and reductions recommended by Olivier Fourès, a specialist in the music of the “red priest” of Venice. His very brief movements, lasting one to two minutes, are then akin to visions. Marianne Piketty makes a ghostly appearance between two mirages of bacchanalia.
Published in 1893, year of the birth of Lili Boulanger, and dedicated to Gabriel Fauré, the elegiac poem of Eugène Ysaye unfolds in voluptuous contortions which, like certain passages of Of a sad eveningevoke the postromanticism of The Transfigured Night by Arnold Schoenberg. In this finely conceived journey (tones common to the works, poetic inspiration) suddenly arises the Sleep by Louis Travenol (1698-1783). Unknown to the baroque battalion, the author, a violinist from the Opera, has created this dream range, in principle sung for a shepherdess, in a cantata with an allegorical title: Pride vanquished by Love (1734). As in the case of elegiac poem d’Ysaye, the arrangement proposed by Axel Nante respects the spirit of the original while taking into consideration what precedes and what follows.
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