programmes

A four-concert tour in Mexico, as part of the Festival Internacional Cervantino and La Gran fiesta franco-mexicana, a celebration of two centuries of diplomatic relations between France and Mexico. The Thirty Years’ War ravaged Germany in the early 17th century. The population, traumatised by the violence of the conflict, needed consolation and hope. The Protestant faith emerged as a bulwark against the death that lurked in everyday life.

Mozart’s Mass in C minor is not merely one of the pinnacles of his sacred music. It is also a crossroads. Behind its dramatic power, behind the virtuosity of its arias and the splendour of its grand choruses, several centuries of musical traditions converge: the counterpoint inherited from Bach and Handel, Renaissance polyphony, Italian concertante style and the new sensibility of Viennese Classicism.

The Membra Jesu Nostri, invite us to contemplation and reflection, and are thus part of the Lutheran spirituality of the post-Thirty Years’ War period, when music became an opportunity for an experience of the sacred that was both individual and deeply embodied.

Vertigo was inspired by this dual reality: the vertigo of a constantly expanding world of sound and the vertigo of a society marked by the memory of war. On the one hand, the polyphonic structures, spatial interplay and sonic splendour inherited from Venice; on the other, more intimate forms – small spiritual concerts, laments and prayers – emerging in a world rendered fragile.

“The Ninth is a work that everyone thinks they know. That is precisely what makes it so fascinating. The question today is perhaps not how to play it, but rather how to listen to it. What remains today of the power of this music, two hundred years after its premiere? And how can we rediscover, behind the monument, the listening experience that this work must have represented for its first listeners?” (Raphaël Pichon)