Symétrie

The Chansons Incas are part of a tradition of the "elsewhere" extending the music world tour taken on by Maurice Ravel (Chansons madécasses), Louis Aubert (Poèmes arabes), Maurice Delage (Poèmes hindo...

Is it really possible for a poet of this quality to disappear without a trace? Not alone, moreover: along with Carco, Derème, and a few others of this "fanciful school", who, on the fringes of the noi...

It is not always well known that Rilke, in the evening of his life, wrote a few poems in French. He gave an admirable motive for this in the very middle of his collection Vergers: Perhaps if I dared w...

Let no one make a mistake about the word épigramme (epigraph): here it does not designate the vengeful witticism, the skilfully fired dart. Régnier uses it in its most Greek, most primitive sense: an...

Those who love Max Jacob (are there many of us left these days?) almost always hesitate between these two poles of the poet's inspiration: the tragic and the humorous - and all the more so given that,...

Ordinarily, what we like and admire in Tardieu is the virtuoso worker of the language, who dismantles the machinery of our speech and hearing, so amusingly and cruelly, and sets fire to all the distre...

I have not forgot my astonishment the day when I discovered the Odes et Prières by an author of whom I, like just about everyone, knew only the droll Knock and the hilarious Les Copains. The vast, lig...

To each of us, Supervielle can effortlessly speak 'his sweet native tongue'. This is not necessarily the criterion for 'high-wrap' poetry, and Mallarmé would be there to tell us the exact opposite. Bu...

Jean Cras (1879-1932) was a devout Catholic: no wonder considering his origins and background. He was a strict practicing Roman Catholic as was his family, then his wife and finally his children. The...

First cycle of French songs dedicated to Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens, Bordes' Paysages tristes are an outstanding attempt to implement the cyclical form to vocal repertoire. To this extent, this work...

In 1874 Verlaine published his Songs Without Words; these inspired Charles Bordes' four songs. These pieces are among his most prominent works for voice and piano. Two of them were first performed in...

So many contradictory masks have been attributed to him: the mystic and the rebel, the wild boy and the scholar… Let us others persist in seeing in Rimbaud, the poet Rimbaud, only the face of a child....

Subtitled as a "dramatic monologue", Ariadne Theseo (Ariadne's letter to Theseus) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, should be seen as echoing Claudio Monteverdi's famous Lamento d'Arianna. It is writte...

Among the contemporary poets set in music by Massenet, Paul Mariéton (1862-1911), a Provence poet and founder of the Revue félibréenne (1895), has a particular place. The two men had known each other...

Confronting the night is probably the first time a child feels destabilised. The familiar outlines of the bedroom fade away into the darkness, the comforting face of the mother disappears behind the d...

Details: narrator, children's voices, soprano saxophone in B-flat (baritone saxophone in E-flat), clarinet in B-flat (bass clarinet in B-flat), viola, cello, harpsichord, percussion

Oldham's setting of the Laudes creaturarum was composed in 1961 as a result of a commission from the Spode Music Week, a festival with workshops, founded in 1954 and still in existence. During those w...

Mostly known for his operas (Mignon, 1866 ; Hamlet, 1867), Ambroise Thomas (1811-1896) also composed about 15 religious works, including some motets, one Messe solennelle (1852) and one Messe de requi...

Ego infelix The Ego influx motet is an almost unknown work by Cristóbal de Morales. Two rather contrasted versions exist: the manuscript 5 from Valladolid1 and the manuscript MM40 from the Porto Libra...

I composed this mass in the first years of my presence at Notre-Dame, before the creation of the association Musique sacrée à Notre-Dame de Paris and the restructuring of the cathedral's choir in its...

This piece was composed in 2013, when we cele­brated the 850th anniversary of the cathedral. It is dedi­cated to my great friend Lionel Sow who conducted the cathedral's choir from 2006 to 2014, an ex...

Why are you so far away Adonaï ? Psalm 9B (passim) The psalm 9B is a violent imprecation: the cry of a man hunted down by the enemy "lying in wait, hidden like a lion in the underbrush. Of this God s...

This work started with the study of a manuscript kept at the Strasbourg University Library. This manuscript is a chorus for mixed voices written by Marie Jaëll and dedicated to her husband. In Steinse...