2023-10-09 09:30:07
Barbara Hannigan and the Emerson Quartet, at the auditorium of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, in Paris, October 7, 2023. GAëL CORNIER / LOUIS VUITTON FOUNDATION.
The Emerson Quartet, a reference group in the classical repertoire, decided to end a forty-seven-year career during which, extremely rarely, only the cellist changed, in 2013. Before bowing out, the October 20 and 21, in New York, their home port, the Emersons were in Paris, Saturday October 7, in the auditorium of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, for an evening designed around their latest record, Infinite Voyage (Alpha Classics).
Screened before the concert, Before It’s Too Late (“before it is too late”), a film by Mathieu Amalric, aims to take us behind the scenes of the recording of the CD made with soprano Barbara Hannigan, with whom he lives. Purely musical questions (tempo, color, balance) emerge less from these cut-off sessions than the “private jokes” (notably on the products of the British hairdresser Vidal Sassoon) which make the public hardly laugh. An endless succession of scenes where the protagonists compete in histrionics, this documentary only skims over the issues of interpretation, whereas they were magnificently exposed in 2017 by Almaric in Music is Music, available on “bonus” DVD of the album Crazy Girl Crazy (Alpha Classics), de Barbara Hannigan.
pocket opera
“Play more and talk less”recommends the sound engineer at the beginning of Before It’s Too Late. The instructions will obviously be respected during the concert which we approach with our ears still “tuned” to the intensity level of the film’s soundtrack. Everything then seems small. The “live” sound of the American quartet and the wise, even humble silhouette of the Canadian soprano. A fragility emerges and, with it, the truth of the musical act. The work that begins the program, melancholy (1917), by Paul Hindemith, is a nice discovery that Barbara Hannigan proposed to the Emersons.
They seem to be on guard at the edge of this set of four melodies on poems by Christian Morgenstern. They gradually get closer in the second (The Mistweaver), to the point, at the end, of giving the impression of integrating his whole being. The soloist no longer sings, but it is her inner voice that we hear. Articulated on a hypnotic march, the third part (Dark drop) is a pocket opera, as is the finale (Forest of dreams), which allows the soprano to lead her partners towards a peak of lyricism, comparable to that of The Transfigured night, d’Arnold Schoenberg, in plus envelope.
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