5 diapasons - An ensemble who likes tension lines

“There are monks and thugs in Poulenc”: we know the phrase of the critic Claude Rostand. Is it suitable for his younger brother Bernard Cavanna? Léo Warynski suggests it, which associates the two French composers. The choir is a cappella at Poulenc. Nothing very “rogue” in the chosen pages, the most secular ones reading the time of Un soir de neige on poems by Éluard; in this flaky landscape, you have to get used to a composition which accentuates the syllables and rolls its "r", flourishing especially in the "burning cold" closing the cantata. The Métaboles do not seek to round the corners and flatten the reliefs of the Quatre motet pour un temps de penitence, colorist miniatures that the composer wanted “as realistic and tragic as a painting by Mantegna”. The archaic and chiming jubilation of Exultate Deo suits this ensemble which does not fear bright light and loves lines of tension.

The choir is joined by the instrumental ensemble Multilaterale for a much more expressionist challenge: Cavanna's Mass on an Ordinary Day which dynamites and buries the Latin liturgy under a deluge of decibels (fanfare, bell, organ, accordion... and voices including three soloists ). She confronts the sacred with the poignant banality of the lines of a drug addict woman freshly released from prison. The composer revised his score (created in 1994) by adding an introductory toccata and reshaping its choral lines on the possibilities of a professional group whose reading easily supplants that recorded by Philippe Nahon with vocal ensembles.