Gérard Pesson - Festival d'Automne

Choruses of the living and the dead, Gérard Pesson's transcriptions are so many exercises in admiration: Ravel, the "frail, mysterious, modest and grating" brother; Scriabin, whose piano, incandescent, if not hallucinated, appeals to the verb, that of Constantin Balmont or Ossip Mandelstam with which Pesson sets his songs; Mahler, whose Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony is adorned with verses by August von Platen; in the Popular Songs, the poems of Philippe Beck are analogically deduced from the tales of the Brothers Grimm, perpetuating their sweet and cruel games; and even a work in creation, a thrène in homage to a friend who died too soon. Between these pieces for choir, whose immediate smoothness Pesson intends to break, the sweet timbre of his voices, intrude a few instrumental pieces punctuating the concert: an unmeasured prelude for piano, in homage to the composer and harpsichordist Froberger; two short pieces, bare, for cello, like an archipelago of sounds for the evening; and the Catch Sonata, transcribing not music, but the Fort-Da of reel play described by Freud, the grasping of an idea that refuses, in silence, the remoteness or the whiteness of obliteration.