Régis Campo, an academician with a taste for risk and melody

2023-05-25 20:00:08

Régis Campo, composer and member of the Academy of Fine Arts, on May 22, 2023, at the Institut de France, in Paris. AUDOIN DESFORGES/PASCO FOR “THE WORLD”

Régis Campo’s music has long appeared as an inexhaustible and communicative source of energy, like Street-Artfresco pulsed with a breathtaking mastery of collective trance, whose TM + ensemble delivered a reference recording for the Signature label, in 2019… until the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, whose composer, born in 1968 suffered greatly, both physically and spiritually. “It’s the first time in my life where I no longer saw a future”, he confides today, remembering having been forced to abandon the orchestral score he had undertaken, before being paralyzed by the virus. It took him a good week to regain normal breathing, “and, with it, the voice, the song, the melody…”.

Although strongly rooted in the contemporary landscape, inclined to innovations of all kinds, Régis Campo has remained attached to melody, since his debut as a composer in Marseille, his hometown, in 1983. And the “post-Covid” piece The Wonder of Life, which was created in 2021 at Radio France, confirmed this orientation, even if this time it went about it in a very different way.

“I needed to free myselfexplains Régis Campo, and I did it using a Bach chorale that had haunted me since childhood. I stretched it for a dozen minutes, probably because my mind was running in slow motion then. » The result is stunning. It proceeds from a solemn step but teems with fantasy. Could this score have marked a change of direction? The composer answers in the affirmative. “Breaking with virtuosity and chaining tight chords is taking a huge risk. »

Reference to David Lynch

Art Spiritthe work which will be premiered on May 26 in Toulouse by the Orchester national du Capitole is, in many respects, in line with The Wonder of Lifeby a similar process of “liberation”, by a new borrowing from Bach and by the cinematographic reference induced by the title. The Wonder of Life operated a shortcut of two Terrence Malik films (The Tree of Lifein 2011, and Perfectlyin 2012) ; Art Spirit is related to David Lynch who once said his bedside book was The Art Spirit, published in 1923 by Robert Henri (untranslated). 7^e art is a logical source of inspiration from someone who claims to be very close, at the Académie des beaux-arts, to filmmakers Coline Serreau (dedicatee of The Wonder of Life) and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

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