Traveling in music in the Royaumont space

Every weekend, until October 2, the Royaumont Festival (Val-d’Oise) invites you to travel through time in the company of artists who, for the most part, have a personal history with the place for having been there. regularly welcomed. This was the case on Saturday September 3, during an opening day which allowed the public to travel not only several centuries of musical creation, but also almost the entire field of the former Cistercian abbey where the festival took root, since the three programs on the bill were given in different spaces.

The first, at the beginning of the afternoon, took place in the refectory of the lay brothers, usually assigned to evening concerts, which mobilize large vocal or instrumental formations. This time, the performers are only three, but, members of the unclassifiable Ensemble Ictus, they multiply with such versatility that one quickly has the impression that they form much more than a trio, which is made up of a soprano (Theresa Dlouhy), a guitarist (Tom Pauwels) and a violist (Eva Reiter). As is often the case with the band established for almost thirty years in Brussels, the concert is understood as a composition in its own right but evolving. The one presented on Saturday thus included the creation of a piece commissioned by the Royaumont Foundation from Sofia Avramidou, a Greek composer born in 1988.

Unusual combinations

Highly contrasted, made up of jolts, even hiccups, but also of almost vaporous lines, Remembering Clouds contains a lot of riches, while saving the best (a part of mystery) for the end. If the three interpreters are called upon here en bloc to exp (l) dare Laure Gauthier’s text, in English translation, they lend themselves to many unusual combinations in the other pages gathered on the theme of melancholy, of the XVII^e century to the present day. The term “page” also seems circumstantial, because the ” composition ” thus obtained is similar to a book of about fifteen pages. Entitled Darker Than Black (darker than black), the program takes lamentation as its field of exploration. The back and forth between hovering rock (Arthur Lavandier, Burkhard Stangl) and suspended baroque (John Dowland, Tobias Hume, Thomas Campion) are much more colorful than the title of the concert suggests, and determine a very seductive palette of nuances. .

From this not always intimate volume emerge two contemporary illuminations of penetrating quality: Mourn, Mourn, by the Austrian Wolfgang Mitterer, and Darkness Awaits Us, of his compatriot Bernhard Gander. Coming from Austria like them, Eva Reiter abandons her viola da gamba for a number of woman-orchestra (melodicas, darbouka, growls of cat womantap dancing) which contrasts with the general tone of the “volume”, as if its My Iron-spurred Lady was a somewhat nimble engraving slipped between two deeper pages.

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