Silesia.
January 15, 1941. In freezing cold, Olivier Messiaen, surrounded by three musicians he met in captivity - Henri Akoka, Jean Le Boulaire and Étienne Pasquier, created his
Quatuor pour la fin du temps
.
Facing them, in the theater hut of Stalag VIII-A, which they used as a concert hall that evening, several hundred deportees listened to them dumbfounded.
The very context in which the work was created, given the difficulty of obtaining instruments and music paper in the camp, would suffice to give it the status of a miracle in the history of music.
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But the eight movements composed by Messiaen during his captivity, directly inspired by the
Apocalypse
of John and deployed like a rainbow of sounds and colors full of hope, juxtaposing suspended moments of delicious ecstasy and running to the abyss, are equally miraculous. And make it not only one of the peaks of Messiaen's work, but also of the chamber music literature of the last century.
What better work, then, to invest the Camp des Milles as the festival dreamed of?
“This place is unique,
explains Dominique Bluzet, at the initiative of the concert.
We have there, in Aix, the only detention camp in France which has seen some of the greatest artists in captivity, such as Max Ernst or Alfred Otto, and which at the end of the war becomes an industrial place again. Like nothing ever happened. As if history could be erased. It will be necessary to wait until the 21st century for it to become a museum. It is a space which has very strong resonances, and which speaks to everyone. The perfect place to remind us that the vocation of a cultural event like the Easter festival is not to be a catalog of works, but to participate in the awakening of consciences through music.
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A view shared by Renaud Capuçon.
“As soon as Dominique told me about his project to organize a concert at Camp des Milles, I thought of Messiaen's Quatuor.
When you enter this place, you become different, as if invested by history.
We play and we listen differently,
he confirms.
It is the ideal place to inhabit a work like this.”
He will be able to rely on three partners of choice for this: Hélène Mercier-Arnault on the piano, Andreas Ottensamer on the clarinet and Kian Soltani on the cello.
“A very international cast, at the same time French, Canadian, Austrian, Iranian, which will confer on this moment an even more universal dimension”
, he smiles.
Spectators present on site will be able to take advantage of a guided tour of the memorial site before the concert.
And if
“the number of places for this concert is limited, the fact of being able to broadcast it on our platform, with images of presentation of the site before by the artists, will allow us to reach as many people as possible, and to show how much these stories talk to everyone”
, rejoices Dominique Bluzet.
April 11 at 8:30 p.m.
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