We discovered Elsa Moatti in 2022 through a record, exile, as a symbol. Even more than the word, synonymous with imperative distance, it is its use in the plural that characterizes the career of the 30-year-old violinist. In the album as in life, his expression testifies, indeed, to an impressive diversity. The former student of Stéphanie-Marie Degand at the Paris Conservatory is, for example, on the bill of Madame Ming (based on a novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, The Ten Children Mrs. Ming Never Hadpublished in 2012, by Albin Michel), until April 16, at the Théâtre Rive Gauche, in Paris. She finds there Xavier Lemaire, author of the adaptation and the staging, who had entrusted her with the role of Jean Valjean in a production of the famous musical Wretchedby Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, when she was in class 4e in the Paris region. “Ah okay, I play a guy…”, had then thought the teenager, disappointed not to embody Cosette or Fantine, the heroines of the play.
Today in Madame Ming, no doubt, Elsa Moatti is indeed a woman (the character of Irene), especially when she proudly leads the dance as a James Bond girl who would have traded her gun for a violin. With the certainty of being there in his place. “I never wondered if I was made for music but I always thought I was made for the stage, for living art”confides the one who, despite her young age, has practiced almost all possible music with her instrument, from the baroque (in the footsteps of Amandine Beyer, whom she admires) to the contemporary (at Ircam, for a piece electroacoustic based on the recognition of gestures), with a predilection for participation in the activities of an ensemble.
She approached Jean-Philippe Rameau with Les Talens lyriques by Christophe Rousset, Irish music with the Extended Mirrors by Fiona Monbet and panoramic programs (The blue Hour, Breadcrumb) with Le Concert Idéal by Marianne Piketty, and also performed with the National Jazz Orchestra (ONJ) for a creation, Ritualswhich earned him a tour of the Balkans in the fall of 2022. “For whole days, we drove along the Danube in a bus and it always seemed different to us, sometimes golden, very calm, sometimes tumultuous, greenish, sometimes under the mist and always fascinating. »
Rare specimen of river violin that meanders through the lands of poetry (“ideal, during early childhood, to escape reality in a dazzling way”), dance (object of a passion, authorized at 12 years old, then abandoned at the cost of a “heartbreak” inconsolable) and theater (“falling on my knees in the skin of Jean Valjean gave me an emotion never felt before in music”), Elsa Moatti seems as moving as the Danube. And also rebellious to cartography. What to think of a violinistic stream that does not have its source in the mountain where the bow is king but in the valley where the 88-key keyboard reigns?
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