Pierre-Yves Macé Concert Palimpseste

In the work of Pierre-Yves Macé, writing is very definitely a palimpsest. It involves the unceasing re-writing of what has already been written for the pleasure of finding new shapes, and throwing their lines into disorder, so that their sequences can be arranged in a different way. This concert brings us several miniatures, a homage to brevity right up to the genres of tradition, opera and cantata.

The chamber cantata Maintenant, de toutes nos forces, essayons de ne rien comprendre, set to a libretto by Pierre Senges, is based on the Bach BWW94 and BWW110 cantatas. It draws literary and musical citations from them, altered in some way. Forging the minutest of new paths within these illustrious models, the tenor and countertenor parts become the secular struggle between materialism and idealism.

Kind des Faust was used 2016 in Sylvain Creuzevault's piece Angelus Novus. AntiFaust, in which a composer is one of the characters. It served as a work of opera within theatre, a piece which provided an alternative reading to Goethe's magnum opus and its forgotten figure of the child of Faust and Marguerite, drowned by their parents and who returns from the kingdom of the dead to seek vengeance.

Opening the concert, and then in between the different cantata and opera, two notebooks from Virgules radiophoniques, made ten years ago for a programme by Gérard Pesson, Boudoir & autres, will be unfurling, in a fluid and coherent way, Developed with instrumentation specifically designed for the purpose, in the here and now of the concert hall, these commas,revisit the initial marks on the page, giving rise to a host of different paths.