Songs – Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing
27.11.20 ___ 20:00
Atelier Lyrique, Tourcoing
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with Lucile Richardot
staging Samuel Achache – la vie brève
We must imagine a place that would not be our reality, a fault on the bowels of our world: an orchestra that has lost the notion of time, plays continuously in a breakage of musical instruments. We must imagine a woman, who sings in English pieces of music of the 17th century that are unknown to us and that will search the melancholy, sadness and sorrows – love most often. This music and song play uninterruptedly so that our sorrows diminish, life remains livable and we record our sorrows.
In the style of a small antique choir, the orchestra and two singers populate and operate this great melancholy machinery. They will make the woman’s descent “in herself” tangible and material. The orchestra will also be the scenography of this show, in the middle of a quantity of musical instruments infinitely superior: rubble of instruments working or not, that we do not know or broken, diverted, cut in half. A real ‘Baroque breakage’, a Parnassus turned upside down.
One day another woman arrives. She claims her pain, refuses to forget, wants to keep her pains sharp. She comes to take her property and prevent it from escaping into oblivion. Will she succeed? Here, a certain order is at work and the oblivion is well kept.
Samuel Achache, staging director
Starting from the universe of Consorts Songs & English Virginalists, while the virtuoso spirit of the Renaissance still stretches on the first years of the seventeenth century, it appeared to us that the world of music that follows Dowland and precedes Blow and Purcell was a world little know, but very fascinating.
It was during this period that the English accompanied monody was born, where the beauty of counterpoint and its dissonances gave a new place to a freedom of declamation, modeled on Italian Caccini & Monteverdi research. The poetic universe is largely derived from the pastoral, while making a more important part of a real dramatic inspiration. Melancholy remains an omnipresent ingredient and a specific English signature.
These songs retrace the art of singing in the English way, where France and its delicacy are never far away, where Italian extravagances are envied and imitated. From William Lawes’s grand narratives to the seduction of John Blow’s melodies, it is the whole English sound universe that is shaping before our eyes and which will build over the years the inspiration of the young Henry Purcell.
Sébastien Daucé, musical director
Information and booking: Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing
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