Voix Sculptées

Debussy by a master transcriber

These qualities could be appreciated in mid‑April at the Louvre Auditorium, during a Sculpted Voices programme presented in parallel with the exhibition “Michelangelo-Rodin: Living Bodies”. Let us forget the projected images drawn from the exhibition – a good idea in principle, but rendered tedious by the slide‑show format, better suited to an art‑history lecture than to a concert, which calls for a parallelism between the fluidity of the music and the flow of the visual elements.

Musically, however, the audience was fully rewarded by a programme that, from Roland de Lassus to Francesco Filidei, illustrated the stylistic versatility of Les Métaboles. Alongside the inspired purity of nine of the twelve Sibylline Prophecies, an unusually ornamented — sculpted — reading of Allegri’s Miserere, and the discovery of Gounod’s neo‑Baroque Miserere CG 144 (a curiosity, though not the most unforgettable page of his sacred output), one will long remember Filidei’s Tutto in una volta, a gripping 2020 work that highlights the astonishing malleability of Les Métaboles’ sound. That same flexibility shone in two fabulous Saint‑Saëns pieces (Calme des nuits, Des pas dans l’allée) — works included on the album Jardin féerique, and all the more savoured here for being free of any distracting projections.

To conclude, we heard Thibault Perrine at work once again, this time in another arrangement of a famous French orchestral piece: Prélude à l’après‑midi d’un faune. For this 2025 transcription, the musician limited himself – if one may put it that way – to using excerpts from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem. All the magic of Debussy’s score is preserved, thanks to the artistry of a master transcriber whom Léo Warynski and his forces serve with as much sensitivity as skill. Admirable.