IN MOUNTAIN CHURCHES, LONG LIVE MUSIC FESTIVALS

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Table of Contents
.............................................................................................. 4
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU, EXORDIUM ........................................ 4
............................................................................. 8
LE CONCERT IMPROMPTU – CLASSIQUE FANTASTIQUE – UNDATED CD, ca. 2021 –
3000330171002 – Wednesday, July 14, 2021, 14:15 – 15:00 – 17:00....................................................... 9
HOT AZOY (https://www.facebook.com/hotazoy.klezmeragite) – KLEZMER TANTS –
UNDATED CD – NO ISBN EITHER – HOT AZOY Route de Propiac 140, Chemin de la source
26170 Buis-les-Baronnies WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 2021, 14:00 ........................................................... 10
DUO LUSTRIN – CONVERSATION LIBRE – RAPHAEL MERLIN – KEVIN SEDDIKI – NO CD –
JUST A CONCERT – WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 2021, 20:30 .................................................................... 11
KEVIN SEDDIKI – SANDRA RUMOLINO – TRES LUCEROS – THREE BRIGHT STARS OR
LUMINARIES – 2016 – 3521383436936 – www.wildner-records.com ................................................... 12
JEAN-LOUIS MATINIER – KEVIN SEDDIKI – RIVAGES – 2020 – 602508648007 –
www.ecmrecords.com............................................................................................................................... 13
LE CONCERT DE L’HOSTEL DIEU – FOLIA – 2021 – 3241348162386 – CONCERT DOLCE
FOLIA – SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2021, 18:00 PM – SAINT-VICTOR MONTVIANEIX ................................... 14
LAURENT MARTIN – COMPOSITRICES D’EXCEPTION – HÉLÈNE DE MONTGEROULT –
CÉCILE CHAMINADE – ARMANDE DE POLIGNAC – BLANCHE SELVA – MEL BONIS – 2019 –
3487549903417 – CONCERT TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2021, 20:30 PM, ÉGLISE DE VISCOMTAT ........... 16
........................................ 18
LAURENT MARTIN – CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – PRÉLUDES.......................................... 18
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – VINCENZO MALTEMPO – GRANDE SONATE...................... 21
LAURENT MARTIN – CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ESQUISSES op. 63 ............................. 23
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ORGAN WORKS VOL.1 .......................................................... 24
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ORGAN WORKS VOL. 2 ......................................................... 26
LAURENT MARTIN - DÉODAT DE SÉVERAC - 2017 – 3487549903233.................................... 29
RITA STROHL – LAURENT MARTIN – AUDE PIVÔT – TITUS ET BÉRÉNICE – 2017.............. 31
LAURENT MARTIN – CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – LE CHEMIN DE FER op. 27 – 1995.... 33
LAURENT MARTIN – MEL BONIS – GUARDIAN ANGEL – 2007............................................... 35
LAURENT MARTIN – MEL BONIS – LE DIAMANT NOIR & DANSES – 2016............................ 36
LAURENT MARTIN – SPANISH COMPOSERS – EXALTACION – 2017.................................... 38
PAULINE VIARDOT – INTÉGRALE DES MÉLODIES RUSSES – LAMIA BEUQUE – LAURENT
MARTIN – 2020-2021 – 3487549903585 – www.lamiabeuque.com www.laurentmartinpianiste.com 41
LAURENT MARTIN – MODEST MUSSORGSKY – PICTURES OF AN EXHIBITION – 2021 –
3487549903578 ........................................................................................................................................... 43
............................................................... 47
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU, EXORDIUM .....................47
...................................................................... 52
LE CONCERT IMPROMPTU - CLASSIQUE FANTASTIQUE - CD NON DATÉ, env. 2021 -
3000330171002 - Mercredi 14 juillet 2021, 14:15 - 15:00 - 17:00............................................................ 52
HOT AZOY (https://www.facebook.com/hotazoy.klezmeragite) – KLEZMER TANTS – NON
DATÉ CD – PAS D’ISBN NON PLUS – HOT AZOY Route de Propiac 140, chemin de la source 26170
Buis-les-Baronnies MERCREDI 14 JUILLET 2021, 14H00...................................................................... 54
DUO LUSTRIN – CONVERSATION LIBRE – RAPHAEL MERLIN – KEVIN SEDDIKI – SANS CD
– JUSTE UN CONCERT – MERCREDI 14 JUILLET 2021, 20:30 ............................................................. 55

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KEVIN SEDDIKI – SANDRA RUMOLINO – TRES LUCEROS – THREE BRIGHT STARS OR
LUMINARIES – 2016 - 3521383436936 – www.wildner-records.com .................................................... 56
JEAN-LOUIS MATINIER - KEVIN SEDDIKI - RIVAGES - 2020 - 602508648007 -
www.ecmrecords.com............................................................................................................................... 57
LE CONCERT DE L'HOSTEL DIEU – FOLIA – 2021 – 3241348162386 – CONCERT DOLCE
FOLIA – DIMANCHE 18 JUILLET 2021, 18H00 – SAINT-VICTOR MONTVIANEIX ................................ 59
LAURENT MARTIN – COMPOSITRICES D'EXCEPTION – HÉLÈNE DE MONTGEROULT –
CÉCILE CHAMINADE – ARMANDE DE POLIGNAC – BLANCHE SELVA – MEL BONIS – 2019 –
3487549903417 – CONCERT MARDI 27 JUILLET 2021, 20H30, ÉGLISE DE VISCOMTAT .................. 60
........................................ 63
LAURENT MARTIN - CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN - PRÉLUDES............................................ 63
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN - VINCENZO MALTEMPO - GRANDE SONATE........................ 66
LAURENT MARTIN - CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN - ESQUISSES op. 63............................... 68
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN - ŒUVRES POUR ORGUE VOL.1.............................................. 69
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN - OEUVRES D'ORGUE VOL. 2 ................................................... 72
LAURENT MARTIN - DÉODAT DE SÉVERAC - 2017 - 3487549903233 .................................... 75
RITA STROHL – LAURENT MARTIN – AUDE PIVÔT – TITUS ET BÉRÉNICE – 2017.............. 77
LAURENT MARTIN – CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – LE CHEMIN DE FER op. 27 – 1995.... 79
LAURENT MARTIN – MEL BONIS – ANGE GARDIEN – 2007.................................................... 81
LAURENT MARTIN – MEL BONIS – LE DIAMANT NOIR & DANSES – 2016............................ 83
LAURENT MARTIN - COMPOSITEURS ESPAGNOLS - EXALTACION - 2017.......................... 84
PAULINE VIARDOT – INTÉGRALE DES MÉLODIES RUSSES – LAMIA BEUQUE – LAURENT
MARTIN – 2020-2021 – 3487549903585 – www.lamiabeuque.com www.laurentmartinpianiste.com88
LAURENT MARTIN – MODESTE MOUSSORGSKI – IMAGES D'UNE EXPOSITION – 2021 –
3487549903578 ........................................................................................................................................... 90

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Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
EXORDIUM
After the long one-year confinement, more or less intensive, but continuous, and yet not
finished, definitely not terminated, with new restrictions that arrived on July 22, COVID-19 pass
compulsory, or under 48-hour-old negative test, this year’s festival, after one year without, is a sort
of miracle, and yet the Delta Variant is arriving, and it is causing a lot of anxiety when figures, the
bad ones, are going up again. Mind you, the Delta Variant is as contagious as chickenpox. Luckily
Macron’s latest TV address to the people has seemingly been effective and it is bringing and will go
on bringing several million volunteers to realize that they have to get vaccinated as fast as possible,
and yet August is not starting very well, and the anti-pass and anti-vax or trying to make those who
are for vaccination feel guilty, though they are not guilty of anything because vaccination is the only
way for the vaccinated not to become COVID-19 spreaders, hence sickness-cum-death-mongers.
That’s the only way to slow down the epidemic and maybe to halt it in its tracks or footsteps, though
these might rather be claw-steps, and provided the concept of herd immunity is valid in this case,
but at what level of vaccination. If we can compare it with polio, the case of Finland is interesting.
Experiences with polio vaccination and herd immunity in Finland
K Lapinleimu, M Stenvik, PMID: 6262149
Abstract
Since the mass vaccination in 1960, infants have been vaccinated systematically with
the inactivated polio vaccine. By school entry, 97% of children have received complete
primary vaccination. Since 1964 no case of poliomyelitis has been found in Finland. An
intensified search for polioviruses among patients with polio-like diseases, among preschool
children and in sewage did not reveal any polioviruses, giving evidence of their
disappearance. Studies on immunity showed unexpectedly large numbers of preschool
children without detectable antibodies to type 1 and especially to type 3. Their response to a
booster dose revealed a secondary-type reaction, indicating immunity. Thus, antibodies in
low or even undetectable titres protect individuals from polio infection and furthermore may
eliminate polio viruses from the country. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6262149/)
We are very far from 97% of vaccinated people, and if we compare with polio, that means
also vaccinating all children.
This virus is really walking on its claws, and it is galloping like a mad beastlike predator. And
it is pathetic to see how some people first refuse to abide by the barrier-gestures like wearing a mask
including over their noses, washing their hands, keeping at a distance from other potential virus
carriers, refraining from touching, shaking hands, and kissing, embracing or hugging all strangers
they meet in any public place, despite the folly of the non-vaccinated to have mass demonstrations
against the famous pass, with no specification if it is the French pass or the European pass. I guess
they might think of both so that they could go on vacation in Spain or Italy or Greece. And they could
demonstrate their concern by throwing a non extinguished cigarette butt through their car window in
a forest area, the way a French Tourist did two days ago in Catalonia.
But this is so circumstantial that it could erase the musics, flatten the mountains and dump
the spirituality. So, let’s open our Book of Revelation, push the door of so many churches, and listen
to the angels singing in the semi-dome apses reverberating the song around into the nave.

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Remember where we come from and let the lessons learned from the massacre of the first world
war that killed half the males between 18 and 40, at times even older, and that destroyed a
flamboyant and rich agriculture, forcing women and many young surviving men to leave the country,
abandon the mountains to their fate, and migrate to the other end of their world, to Paris and Lyon.
Women, especially young women, became maids in hotels or the families of industrialists and
merchants; and men, particularly young men, opened Auvergnat bars and restaurants if they could
collect the necessary capital, or worked in industries like underground or tram transportation. What
else could they do since they only had rural qualifications? The happy ones only migrated to
Clermont Ferrand to work for Michelin, or even slightly closer to work for the railway company (Paris-
Lyon-Marseille, the PLM company). This demographic movement was not called migration, but
exodus and these Auvergnat people from the Livradois and Forez mountains went to the close-by
or distant Promised Land and they were to be forever immortalized by Georges Brassens.
It belongs to you, this simple song,
You, the Auvergnat who simply
Gave me four pieces of wood
When, in my life, it was cold,
You who gave me fire when
The bigots and the zealots,
All with the best intentions,
Had closed their doors in my face...
It was nothing but a wood fire,
But it warmed up my body,
And in my soul, it’s still burning
Like a midsummer bonfire.
That was a time that has mostly disappeared, and these Auvergnats in Paris are no longer
real Auvergnats. They are Parisians with some Auvergnat aftershave, the one that vaguely smells
like cows or sheep, et “ils s’y parlent en patois.” (they there speak themselves in patois.) But they
have their businesses in the big cities around small squares that become the stages of guitar players,
smoking a pipe or not, and inventing popular music as long as the cops are tolerant, and they have
supposedly been since the time when Jacques Chirac was the Mayor of Paris and edicted that street
artists were artists first and should be supported. And I must say that these Auvergnats, or Bougnats
as they are also called, are nothing but a nostalgic vision recollected from parents and grandparents.
Today Brassens and some others are like a nightmare more often than a dream reconstructed on
the blueprint of a medieval love story that never reached any future clime and disappeared when the
cultivation of hemp was banned slightly more than a century ago despite the tremendous riches it
represented for the Ambert plain and the Dore valley after Colbert decided to develop the royal navy
with the Casadean pines for the masts and the hull, and with the hemp fiber turned into ropes and
cables for the rigging and into canvass for the sails, all these materials going down the Dore and
then the Allier and then the Loire to end up in Saint Nazaire and around. The end of sailing ships
killed this cultivation and the fact the farmers used the leaves as a substitute to tobacco that was a
state monopoly brought the Third Republic to the decision to ban its cultivation entirely. The 1914-
1918 demographic gendercide of males was only the last straw that broke the back of the camel.
And this Auvergne is no longer a region, but only a distant sub-section of a bigger one, and
its history is forever buried in the “Pet Semetaries” of dreamers lost in the humdrum criticism of their
forever disappearing myth. Some Lugubrious Tim Burton brought back to earth a Corpse Bride that
gives life to the dead, brings up a Renascence, a revival, a new life that sees year after year the
reverse exodus of the older one, a new exodus that brings the people from the big cities to these
mountains, buying houses, renovating them, even at times becoming permanent residents. And from
these mountains, or rather from the music lovers in these mountains, music teachers or music
merchants, were born to this life more than 45 years ago, these Vollore Concerts targeting the
summer migrants, these people we call from time-to-time tourists, even when they are not real ones.
The objective was, and still is, to make the souls of the damned and the dead sing in the forest and
mountain, mind you, in the most spiritual places possible to go back as far as to the druids of long
ago, singing when picking mistletoe in the oak trees for their ritual celebrations.

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The Gaulish sacred places were determined by the underground circulations of water and
magnetism. The Gaulish druids made such nodal points the sites of their dolmens, menhirs, cairns,
and cromlechs, with or without sacrificial altars. The Romans arrived, delayed by the absence of a
road from what is today the plateau of La Chaise Dieu to the plain of Arlanc-Ambert, and they turned
these sacred spots into Roman sacred temples, particularly to the god Mercury, but he is far from
the only one. And The Christians arrived, particularly after Charlemagne’s religious reform and with
the Dominicans, be they from Cluny or La Chaise Dieu, who built churches on the very same spots.
They were Romanesque churches at first on the ground, but they were built slowly, and they followed
the evolution towards some simple gothic style and these churches were conceived and designed
originally as the Romanesque progression of the faithful from the west to the east, from the world to
the promised land of Jesus, from the western porch to the choir, the semi-dome apses actually in
the older form of these choirs. And with time and new styles they moved to the main door on the
south flank of the churches that were getting Gothic in their vaults, to still progress like pilgrims to
the eastern choirs, themselves rebuilt in gothic style. Spirituality was in all these churches: music
with the singing of the congregation and at times some local musicians. Music too with the bells
ringing regularly in the morning, at midday, and in the evening, giving some tempo to life. But also,
paintings, frescos, statues, representations of the Christian faith, and even Christian saints or even
God himself. But you can also find a tremendous collection of Virgins, Black or any other color, and
even styles, of Christ on the cross, of historiated capitals telling the most important episodes of the
life of Jesus or bringing up all sorts of symbols and representations of the Christian elevation that
confession, prayers, communion, and meditation (often called contemplation) could bring. You will
find, in Courpière, for one example a monkey on such a capital as a symbol of knowledge, of faith.
It is very well “hidden”, but I am sure I can find it again if I remember well the time when with Michel
Thénot we photographed it. Strangely enough, this vision of the monkey as a symbol of elevation
and hence Christian knowledge, since he/it can climb in trees, is the same value as the monkey in
Maya culture: there the monkey is identified as a scribe, hence a poet, hence a writer of the sacred
books known as Codices, the sacred books the Spaniards burnt in the 16th
century, and these sacred
books contained the famous sacred calendar, the Tzolkin calendar of 260 days (13 times 20). If the
Human Species descended from apes, we seem in several cultures to have kept the memory of it.
In the old Chinese Buddhist saga, Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng’en, the main disciple, Sun
Wukong, of the Buddhist monk, the younger brother of the Chinese Emperor, is a Monkey known as
the Great Sage Sun. The Tang priest, known as Sanzang, was sent by Emperor Tang to the Western
Heavens to get the scriptures of Buddhism from the Living Buddha there (we can easily think we are
speaking of Tibet and the Dalai Lama) to establish Buddhism in China in the place of Taoism and
other primeval religions.
And you could listen to these damned and dead people from the past in these churches if
you followed the deep routes of underground water and earthen magnetism that are identified in the
historiated capitals. Always from West to East, but certainly not along a straight line. In the Cluny
tradition, the routes might be blurred because the Cluny Benedictines did not refuse moving capitals
around when some reconstruction or extension was done in a church, whereas in the Casadean
Benedictine tradition they were kept in place all the time. We have lost many of these spiritual
beacons, and we have been idiots, as Henri Pourrat said when he accused the people in Ambert to
have deconstructed a cromlech in order to build their round city hall with the stones. The cromlech
is surviving in the round shape of the city hall. We know what Jules Romain compared this round
city hall to. Not much for sure, and what’s more an immigrating cheese from Normandy.
So, you can understand how well inspired the founding fathers and mothers of these Vollore
Concerts were to have them in the churches, small or big, as much as possible. Music is spirituality.
The churches are spiritual places. Music is at home in these churches, and that retie an old rope
going back to King David since Kind David is the one who started the first music academy in Israel
to train the singers and the musicians necessary for the reading of the Old Testament, the Torah.
Some reconstructed musical recordings of these Hebraic musics exist in Paris at La Cité de la
Musique, in their library. I worked on these musics something like ten years ago. We are in Livradois-
Forez with these Vollore Concerts re-founding our own modern spirituality in some of the oldest
traditions that were broken in France by the French Revolution. We applauded when Nietzsche
declared God dead, not understanding that to declare Him dead is also the assertion that He at least
was alive sometime before dying, hence that His creation of the world was real. The latest version
of this concept of the death of God was developed by Marcel Gauchet in his last seminar before

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retiring five years ago. He built a whole philosophical construction on this principle: the death of God,
and he did not and probably still does not see that he posits God as the creator of the world by just
killing Him and burying Him. It is difficult to bury someone who has not died, hence who has not lived
before dying, and burying Him is to establish a beacon about his real life if God was ever a real
character. If he was not, if he was only virtual, a figment of some human imagination, he could not
die either. At times, modern supposedly transformational if not revolutionary left-leaning
philosophers invent such logical monsters that it makes me seasick, just the same as walking on a
totally open and unprotected terrace at the top of a skyscraper in New York like the Devil’s Advocate
and the Devil himself in a 1997 film of the eponymous title did. And that is more than simple vertigo.
Directly falling into Xibalba, the underground realm of the Death Lords of the Mayas.
Such radical negation of simple concepts, that are nothing but concepts, but as concepts,
they keep our minds upright and walking, in fact, wants to take us into some godless schizophrenia
that considers insulting religions and the main concepts of religions is justified as the acme of rational
liberation. If some might take these “insults” literally and might find it hard not to suffer because of
them, our modern godless, or rather God-negating or God-burying zealots, because they are zealots,
consider it is the fault of these poor sufferers: let them drop their religions and then they won’t suffer
anymore. We call that democracy, though it is pure rational totalitarianism.
You can understand why I consider these Vollore Concerts are a real rebirth of our mountains,
of the people living here. They try to fill up the enormous chasm that the rationalistic rejection of
anything spiritual has created under our feet, and we complain that we do not feel any firm ground
on which to stand. These spiritual musics – music is always spiritual – in these spiritual places reborn
to our appreciation and consciousness, bring us back to life because life has to be spiritual, or it
cannot be at all. The particular spirituality concerned for people does not matter really. Each person
can choose the spirituality they prefer or like, but it has to be spirituality. The Vollore Concerts and
their founders came to the same conclusion as Galileo Galilei, after officially rejecting his theory:
“And yet it turns!” Spirituality is the rotation of the human mind without which this mind cannot even
pretend to exist. Music enables us to dance to this rotation, cry to it, laugh to it, enjoy it through and
through.
And like a Rip Van Winkle coming out of his hibernating cave into a world he had not imagined
before going to sleep; like a Drac trying to stop a TGV – which will never come up in Auvergne since
we will never have a real TGV, except maybe one going through between Vichy and Moulins – with
his sole hands; like a Galipote demonizing wind turbines on Puy de Dôme, this sleeping volcano that
already carries a totally useless TV antenna that has been turned into a mega relay antenna for cell
phones, soon enough 5G in the coming years, a TV antenna that this very Galipote mythologizes as
if it were Cyrano’s nose on which migrating birds perch themselves in the summer; like these very
Galipotes who are afraid the wind turbines might catch their brooms and bring the brooms and their
witch-passengers down after mincing them into hamburger paddies; like all these, our Vollore
Concerts have survived their forced intermission.
But frankly, who could think a simple virus, not even retro-at-all, could kill the music in the
name of a viral ransomware that refuses to give its name and show its face. It brought back to life
the plague-believers who consider dying is the very finality, end, objective of life and history. As
some José Valverde would say, borrowed from the popular wisdom I have heard all my life, life is
lethal, and it should be handled with great care and in moderation. Those plague-believers do not
want to stop the plague, of course not, because it is the cleansing episode of this earth either by
God’s decision or by nature’s reaction, you know Gaia, the living organism the earth is in the living
cosmos and its many multiverses beyond our universe. The plague-believers are desperately trying
to reject any man-made protection against what is for them the will of a God they believe as hard as
rock is dead and has been dead for a while, and they are trapped in their anti-vax mass
demonstrations – like all Jehovah Witnesses and other religious zealots – that are the best nurseries
for the virus since anti-vax people are normally not vaccinated. The plague-believers consider that
after all God survives in the necessary doomsday of the planet that will eradicate humanity. And the
plague-believers could be right if the planet and humanity do not find communion in the cleansing of
the body and communication in the music of the mind, of the soul, of the spirit, this new holy grail
and trinity of today’s future in the past, tomorrow’s conditional of global survival, regenerescence,

8
rebirth maybe if our vaccines finally bring manageable demography in the overpopulated deserts of
the consumer’s society of yesterday.
The she-wolf stone in La Chabasse church in Olliergues is bringing the end of the insane
conquest of life by death that can only find its salvation in the DRIMIDRI to which it is dedicated: the
triple DEMETER, the twice triple goddess for whom DRI multiplied by DRI equals NINE, the
Apocalypse, just after the Second Coming. Can this Triple Goddess of our oldest Indo-European
roots save a world that has sworn to exploit the cosmos till all universal ethics and multiversal
psychosis do us part forever from the enlightenment of a society that has claimed we were all born
equal to hide and cover up the abduction of global life by the most hateful monopolistic start-up of
mental control, the control of minds by the insane entrepreneurs of the mechanization of human
thought turned into humanoid binary machine code.
The Vollore Concerts are one rare narrow door (La Porte Étroite, 1909) in the fabric of the
duration of the expanding multiverse that we have to recognize, the narrow door, and squeeze
ourselves through like André Gide in his own time (1869-1951, February 19, I was six years old on
the day before, and this year is the 70th
anniversary of his death) a time that was dreading the
resurgence of barbarity (and the two world wars had still to come, though the European and
American colonial barbarity was all over the world), and that narrow door is in no way an escape
route to no parallel world because there is no parallel world except in the creative minds of novelists
like Stephen King, or in the deranged minds of a handful of mad scientists who even use their
mathematics to calculate the funnels communicating from our universe to those other parallel
universes. “Malheur à l'homme qui met sa confiance en l'homme.” ("Woe to the man who puts his
trust in man." André Gide)
Welcome to the sane ranting and raving of these Vollore Concerts that try to be the powerful
and bitter gentian of today’s Danse Macabre of the twice triple DRI-mi-DRI that blazes a track in our
jungle that might lead to a reasonable renascence in our vast necropolis of a life. Oh! Fritz Lang,
please, come back and show us the figment of our mental anarchism that may produce the end of
all dances, macabre or not. From the film Metropolis, we moved to the Necropolis of Auschwitz, and
now we have to move on to the Megapocalypse of the thinning of the human overpopulation of this
planet. And it is the ultimate revelation that you can only find in music when this music is played in a
spiritual place for an audience open to spirituality.
“The Spirit and the Bride say, “come.” Let everyone who listens to the music answer, “Come.”
Then let all who are thirsty come: all who want it may have the water of life, the music of the mind,
and have it free.” (Book of Revelation, 22:17)
And even more to the point:
“Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then
relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.” (I Samuel 16:23)
I will retain some of the concerts I have attended and the CDs of the various groups I saw
this year 2021, with a special retrospective of most of what I have written about Laurent Martin, the
founding father, and Charles-Valentin Alkan I discovered in these Vollore Concerts with Laurent
Martin at the piano.
This presentation or essay will be bilingual, and the full French version will come second.
Most of these reviews and texts were originally written in English.

9
LE CONCERT IMPROMPTU – CLASSIQUE FANTASTIQUE – UNDATED CD,
ca. 2021 – 3000330171002 – Wednesday, July 14, 2021, 14:15 – 15:00 –
17:00
A quintet of exclusively wind instruments, most of them reed instruments like different
clarinets, different oboes, one bassoon, one flute, and one horn. The composition of these five artists
and these five instruments or types of instruments is surprising in many ways because there is
something metallic, and yet not so much, aerial and light, yet responsive and dynamic when
necessary. We are in some kind of other cosmos, universe, not ours, one of the multiverses in some
other dimensions, floating in this music, like a wave in some string particle that is evanescent and
yet moving. Do not try to recognize the musics that have been adapted for these five instruments
though it had been composed in their time for full orchestras, at times big ones. Strangely enough,
the one I prefer remains Mendelssohn’s Scherzo of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, capturing the
uncatchable tricky and very winsome and whimsical nature of this dear Puck, and he will not
apologize at the end for his rather crazy dance and fugue on the other side of reality, the side of the
fairies and Tatiana.
But to go back to the beginning we had first Gluck and one scene of Orfeo and Eurydice and
the mixtures of these sonorous instruments give some kind of marshal-like dimension to the march
that slows down at one time as if the two characters had decided to stop and look at the nature
around them and they get into some description of this nature as not so much majestic as simply
mysterious and impressive. And there might be some mysterious presence behind this canopy of
natural beauty, the mysterious presence of some fatal and menacingly attractive dimension.
Mozart comes next with Seine Kleine Nacht Musik. You will recognize the tune for sure, but
the wind instruments give it some martial dimension so that it is a sort of night music in a lucid not
dream but half nightmare half haunting vision, and lucid you are that this night creature is going on
tiptoes around your bed, and after the minuet, you can join the monster, the night creature in a rondo
that can whirl and spin on its one axle. You might get slightly snooze- and vertigo-taken but don’t
forget you will have to wake up, and when you wake up it will be gone. I just wonder if there was not
some cat or feline being in this rondo, running after its own tail.
Dvorak is next on our list with one movement of his American Quartet. I must admit this piece
is fascinating and mesmerizing in its reedy rendition or should I say personification. A sort of great
lady with a vast and flying dress all around her as she steps, one two three, around the dream of a
continent that meant a lot in those days and means today several genocides, the latest one being
the genocide of Indian children in the forced westernizing education of the children kidnapped from
their families and whitewashed into the good old Christian dictatorship of – one two three – the trinity
of father-son-holy-spirit into some kind of frozen frame English-Christianity-European-centered-
morals, the three meaning nothing but the acculturation of a genocidal deculturation. The reed
instrument and other wind instruments give some nostalgia and probably shameful guilt in our minds
that can today only remember these genocides, these culturicides, these childrenicides.
But here is Puck again and his capricious Queen Tatiana taking over the whole wedding
ceremony of the Duke and his Beloved fiancée to make it a tale of two universes that rarely meet
except in the string theory of Michio Kaku, and the reed instruments are a real deepening change
from this string theory of the multiverse of our mental derangement and corrugated arrangement that
it is for this Shakespearean never-ending fable.
But we have to go back to Mozart and adagio and allegro for what is called a mechanical
organ, meaning in Mozart’s time a simple church organ that was one of the favorite instruments of
Johan Sebastian Bach. Don’t expect the grandiose rendition of the phenomenal Bachian fugues for
the great church organs of the time. It is rather slow and yet maelstrom-like, a giant slow eddy in the
middle of the ocean or the lake or the Rhine, the eddy that reveals the strange life of a water monster
that may become dangerous if it gets out of its water to set its feet on the ground. Quite typical of
the mysterious and mystical storytelling of the Chinese “Journey to the West” by Wu Cheng’en. And
we wonder if these reed instruments and their wind acolytes will be able to bring the holy missionary
to the Buddha in the west, after battling and defeating all these water monsters. But the second
movement starts very sad. The mission is lost. And yet listen to the melody that floats over the dull

10
landscape. The famous Ape King is going to be an expert bandit and he will steal the magic weapon,
the treasure of this monster. Listen to him getting up, changing form, infiltrating this Water Beast’s
palace, and getting his last word, his last laugh. A promise rather than an end.
Queen Mab’s Scherzo by Berlioz is a call to wake up in this world where all noises are
anything but reedy and musical, except this noise becomes the raw material of some computer and
it is mashed up into some supermarket cafeteria magical soup that is more a mind-gobbling beverage
than soup though it may have the taste of soup but never believe what the taste tells you. This Queen
Mab is madder than anything else, “maboule” as they would say in French. If you are able to imagine
what it is to spend two weeks in the deranged wing of some hospital where everyone is detained
inside their own shared insanity. Don’t argue with her. She always has the last word, strutting as she
is, like a peahen believing she may be a peacock, or maybe a peacock butterfly arriving straight from
China and conquering the inattentive world of our music lovers into turning themselves into notes on
the five lines of the scoresheet of social insanity. And a final shiver, shudder, quake, and sorry folks,
I am gone.
We can end with Pascoal and his “Viagem.” The piano added to the reed and wind
instruments turn the trip, a lot more modern than the previous pieces, into a class of bad pupils on
some outing looked after negligently by the piano. Listen to the dark leader of this band of hooligans,
the bassoon that is calling the various moves and adventures. And the piano gets lost in translation.
Too bad for him. I guess he will not be medaled with a “good teacher’s insignia,” though he could
have done better with a little bit more concentration.
HOT AZOY (https://www.facebook.com/hotazoy.klezmeragite) –
KLEZMER TANTS – UNDATED CD – NO ISBN EITHER – HOT AZOY Route
de Propiac 140, Chemin de la source 26170 Buis-les-Baronnies
WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 2021, 14:00
First some definitions for those who do not know what Klezmer music and dances are.
“The word klezmer itself can be divided into two Yiddish words, ‘klei’ (meaning vessel)
and ‘zimmer’ (meaning song). Although we know this music as ‘klezmer’, originally the term
was used to describe the musician playing the music rather than the genre itself – “play that
music, Klezmer!” or Shpiel Klezmer Shpiel. Many practitioners of klezmer liken its technique
to making one’s instrument ‘speak in Yiddish’ and like all folk genres klezmer has its own set
of ornaments, traditional forms, and rhythmic patterns.” (Jewish Music Institute,
https://www.jmi.org.uk/about-us/music-genres/klezmer/)
You will know at once the music comes from central and mostly eastern Europe. You might
be able to recognize the Yiddish of the songs. There are in this music two dimensions, maybe three.
First of all, a sort of joy that comes out of the songs and the tunes, the joy of some celebration like
some Jewish rituals (a Bat-Mitsvah for example), some wedding or simple community feasts. These
songs draw a lot from Romania, Ukraine, and other countries from this part of Europe that has been
severely impacted by the Nazi final solution. A Yiddish song in that tradition becomes a revival, and
I mean resuscitation since the objective of the Nazis was to exterminate the Jewish people and their
culture. It also draws some texts and music from the still alive tradition in the Jewish community in
New York and the USA. This implies some real modernization of the themes, but it remains typically
Jewish, Eastern European Jewish with some “oriental” influence some might say, which is natural
since “oriental” music in this understanding is coming mostly from the big Arab Semitic brother of
northern Africa and the Middle East, some might recognize some Turkish, or shouldn’t I say Ottoman,
influence.
It is perfect music for any kind of banquet with or without dancing. It is a music that creates a
sort of immediate community spirit. This music is calling for you to get on your feet and start dancing,
not strutting, but really dancing on your toes mostly and springing and bouncing around as if you
mere the wild deer and other forest animals of Puck and Tatiana in Midsummer Night’s Dream. A
direct allusion to the fantastic world, the parallel universe under or next to ours that Shakespeare

11
has so well depicted with the bridge from the one to the other with a small play in the play “Pyramus
and Thisbe.” And that bridge is also a symbolical sacrifice of these characters to enable the rulers of
Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta, to get married and bring some state prosperity to their people in
Athens. There is in this comedy a deep underflow of grief, fear, disruption, violence even, just as in
all joyful events of the Jewish community today, a community that has experienced twenty-one
centuries of diaspora and the cruelest event of them all was and is the holocaust.
You can either get into communion with the joy or the underlying sadness, anyway, you will
enter a tradition that is as old as the Christian era, with a long Mosaic, Abrahamic, Solomonic and
Davidian preface of maybe ten more centuries. And do not forget the music school founded by King
David is the first organized and institutionalized form of our western music, even if it pushed roots
into the older Babylonian and Sumerian traditions, the Sumerians being the first people who
transcoded the harp and the music itself on various tablets written in cuneiforms, the oldest known
writing system in the world, though it might not be the first one, but it is the oldest one we know that
was developed something like 3000 years BCE in its full form with older precursive tablets found in
Romania and dating back to 6000 BCE.
It should be very exhilarating for you to listen to this music in a definitely modern version and
just expand yourself into its past and its meaning for millions of people in the world. That was a very
good choice for the community repast of the Vollore Concerts in Vollore-Ville on July 14, Bastille Day.
It was in 1789 that what was to become the French Revolution decided to drop all anti-Semite
classification and segregation. It was raining like hell on this July 14, 2021, but in the Yiddish tradition
we have to keep in mind hell and heaven are both on earth, one covering the other and vice versa
the other covering the one, intricately interknitted into a fabric of joy and grief in one breath, in one
heartbeat.
DUO LUSTRIN – CONVERSATION LIBRE – RAPHAEL MERLIN – KEVIN
SEDDIKI – NO CD – JUST A CONCERT – WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 2021,
20:30
Let me be clear. This was no classical music, a concept that represents little since it is used
by many to include baroque music, romantic music, opera music, church music, and many other
styles and genres. For many, it is music composed some time ago, far enough not to be protected
as intellectual property in our present time. For some others too it covers symphonic music and
chamber music, etc., etc. with this duet it is clear we are dealing with borrowed themes that are
systematically arranged and used as the references of all sorts of variations. In fact, it would be
exactly what Steinbeck answered some Soviet people when he visited the USSR in the 1950s and
was asked what jazz was. His answer to a question about it was that you take any piece of music,
and you start improvising on it with, if possible, some syncopated rhythm or harmony. This duet, both
the guitar and the cello, both amplified are very directly improvising on themes picked here and there
in their musical culture. It may include Gabriel Fauré, Robert Schumann or Johann Sebastian Bach,
and others, but it also includes Chick Corea and others from the popular music or jazz music fields.
The two instruments are constantly entering some dialogue, at times confrontations, at times
very well conducted dances; one with the other, or vice versa, or each one alone, at times one silent
as if it were thinking how it was going to attack the improvisation of the other. It is good. It is
reassuring. It is welcome. We need to reconcile all musical styles and genres. Music is a multilingual
planet and to pretend or attempt to reduce it to one genre and lock it up in it. Music is a multiverse
of sonorous languages that finds their only justification in the architecture it builds with these sounds,
in the colors it spreads from one sentence to the next, from one instrument to another. Music, in fact,
is always a classical way of expression. Who cares about the bottle, provided we can get drunk on
the wine or other liquor this flask contains? Music is speaking to all our senses, it is all-sensorial,
including the most abstract mind of ours and all the recollections, emotions, and dreams it may
contain. If a music does not work your inner sensors as deeply as a glass octopus appearing in our
deep-sea hallucinogenic hallucinations, there is something wrong with your senses and sensors. To
be embraced and sucked into death at the core of the eight tentacles of this invisible, translucid, and
transparent glass octopus is the most vivid and lucid power music takes and has over us, dominating

12
our will and desires into an apocalypse of the heart, a tsunami of the spirit, a flood and landslide of
the soul, not to mention the eruption of all sorts of impulses and instincts. Music speaks to the many
million sensors we have in our bodies, including those we fantasize about in the depth of our beds
in the sinking maelstrom of the night.
I must say the association of a guitar and a cello is a great idea and the two can really copulate
on the stage in the most appealing way possible. It is such musical moments that can be called bliss,
that can generate euphoria and rapture in our enlightened somber hormonal beatitude, and that’s
why music can be sacred, and it is sacred to so many churches, mosques, synagogues, temples,
and other such groups, parties, and conventions founded on faith. And this faith in the transcending
beauty of our all-sensorial bliss may lead us to understand what Emmanuel Gobillard would probably
consider being “la pudeur” that turns this deep bliss, euphoria, or beatitude into the sacred veil of the
temple that contains and controls these confusing hormonal thrills even if this “pudeur” is in no way
translatable into English, the closest term being maybe “modesty.”
But I cannot get away from this concert without covering the CDs that were available. They
concern mainly Kevin Seddiki and his guitar.
KEVIN SEDDIKI – SANDRA RUMOLINO – TRES LUCEROS – THREE
BRIGHT STARS OR LUMINARIES – 2016 – 3521383436936 – www.wildner-
records.com
The culture of the mixing and merging of differences and distances becomes omnipresent
with some artists in our modern times. They call this hybridization or creolization, or even
mongrelization. These words are badly inspired because they refer to something that is always seen
as inferior, not pure, and that is a mistake. Interknitting different styles, influences, traditions, is
fundamentally human and has always existed and has always produced new forms of beauty or truth.
The fact is that, too often in the past, this had come along with conquest, colonization, genocidal
vassalization, etc. The culture of the conquered is taken possession of by the conqueror and the
origin is only quoted if the originators, the primeval inventors have been exterminated. Otherwise, it
is simply not revealed because it is plagiarism, and this is even worse than genocide since it is
culturicide: you exterminate the mind, spirit, and culture of people who are thus dispossessed.
No barrier gestures with these two artists. Sandra Rumolino brings together Argentinian and
Indian origins in a typical and dynamic reality in Latin America. Kevin Seddiki is the typical cultural
and ethnic salad bowl of a Frenchman who interknits Maghreban origins from Algeria, though not
specified whether Arab or Kabyle and some Italian roots too. And music is for them the hot sauce
they need to develop a vision that brings together the tango tradition of Argentina and the more
oriental and jazzy power of North Africa.
But let me be more precise about this skillful graft of so distant cultures.
Sandra Rumolino’s voice is in a range that is deep enough to sound somber and high enough
to keep some hope on the table, in one word it is dramatic and used for that very purpose: to create,
invoke, summon emotions that are in no way sinister or even sad to the point of depression, and yet
it brings up some distance in our own life, in life itself and makes us think that maybe it is not always
the romantic walk on some avenue under cherry trees in bloom in Spring. There is in this voice and
the words of the songs some nostalgia of a simple equilibrium in human feelings balancing hate with
love and fear with optimism. This is the general color of the songs, the clair-obscur, chiaroscuro of
the soul or the mind.
The guitar is accompanying the songs but at the very same time, it is an instrument of its own.
It has its own life, and you can just appreciate the rhythm, the tempo, and the melodious support to
the voice and the words. We regret we do not have all the lyrics in the booklet, but the guitar is there
to make us think and feel what the words, at times sinistra, are telling us though “ne comprenda.”
This is particularly powerful with the fourth track, “Piedra y camino.” The voice finds in the guitar the
semiotic resonance that tells us what the song is all about.

13
Just get into this music and let yourself delve into it and dissolve in the music. You might get
to some sky with stars all around and you might be the very anti-star human dark being in a universe
of light. Darkness is our salvation when our mind discovers that light comes from inside and not from
outside, the light of the heart, the light of emotions and life, forever alive in our closed eyes, on our
simmering retinas. And you will come to the last word of this trip in a parallel universe. “Adiós!” And
the sound of the rain on the lake behind your house will sing the promise of a second chance when
the summer will come back. And a short guitar solo will make you dream of tomorrow. But is the final
nursery rhyme an echo of the “Ruht wohl” at the end of Saint John’s Passion by Johann Sebastian
Bach? I believe so. In what world will a child, the child, children be born, be raised, be adults? Who
knows and who can say in this age of great migration? Check this version from Amsterdam,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyws8MYWNok.
JEAN-LOUIS MATINIER – KEVIN SEDDIKI – RIVAGES – 2020 –
602508648007 – www.ecmrecords.com
Probably less jazzy than you might expect. It is rather a rich improvisation on themes taken
here and there and merged together when necessary or possible. The instruments are surprising in
many ways. The guitar does things we would have said were impossible, and yet they are there in
front of us. At times I wonder if there is not a second guitar in the wings or if they are using some
recorded soundtrack. But the result is beautiful. The second track “Après la pluie,” is even mentally
disruptive. We seem to be confronted with a world that has gone through some apocalypse and is
nothing but a repetitive reiteration of sounds like the echo of the raindrops falling on a vast amplifying
membrane.
And yet in the third track, the guitar is acting like a very vocal baby in a crib or is it a cradle
impersonated by the accordion, a cradle that is nicely rocking and rolling, both at the same time, as
if it were sailing on a slightly rough sea, and the baby is agitated, is moving, stirring, kicking maybe,
and at other times mellow and sweet in some slumber that might be taken for sleep.
And sleep they do, and they can let dreams jump into life in that multiverse of another
universe, parallel and transzonal. In our simple, and mostly seen as flat, universe there is the irruption
of another dimension, of many other dimensions, of string particles and strings of particles, like the
notes played very clearly separated at times on the guitar, And I have the feeling there must be
monsters and beasts, in this parallel universe, a way of speaking since all universes are convex or
concave but never flat and then can never be parallel. An easy way to speak of the other side of the
moon, of the unseen side of the dark light that surrounds us without us being able to see it, the other
side of a black hole, as if a hole, black or any other color, could have another side that is maybe the
end of its bottomless abyss.
And seeing is the point here when we get to “miroirs” (“Mirrors”) since then we can see in
depth the multiplication of all images, as well as of breads and fish in this so deep a mirror that has
no bottom. In a mirror, an image always has another double, or a triple if you just set one-on-one,
face-to-face a pair of mirrors facing each other. And imagine the mirrors of the county fair in
Woodland or the state fair in Sacramento, the rides you took in some mirror palace where all mirrors
are out of shape and give hundreds of pictures of yourself as anything but yourself. Then you know
there is a dinosaur in you, and you descend from some chimpanzee.
But “Greensleeves” is another story. Get down into the guitar, and that is perambulating on
the score while the accordion is trying to create its own score within the score but in vain, and the
guitar remains dominant and is dropping its notes one after another like beads on a rosary, but the
rosary has no end since it is a vast chain that starts where it ends and ends where it starts. The
accordion gets into some rebellion against this rosary and its never-ending or never-beginning
salvation, and salvation means to get out of the humdrum routine of a rosary in a church or chapel.
Let’s get into the great wilderness of the world and see what we can find. The guitar then reacts and
tries its own outer space stepping beyond the looking glass and this time the rosary can come back
but the accordion has lost its spite, spirit, desire, salacious cravings.

14
But the night is still there, and the night is animated by some fireflies or other glowworms,
flying or not and some will-o'-the-wisps dancing in the sky, dancing in the forest, dancing in the
streets, dancing on the rooftops, and that sempiternal dancing, whimsical and capricious,
unpredictable, and fascinating, invades the whole vision we may have or may want to have of the
beauty of the night. Are these will-o'-the-wisps devilish or angelic, beautiful or frightening, invasive
or migrating? They become like a hallucination in a restless and sleepless night in a war zone.
But there is always a Helen somewhere in our brains, not minds really, because that Helen
comes from so far away in the past that we obviously inherited her with our genes. The guitar tries
to evoke the woman who dared to provoke one of the worst genocidal wars in western tradition. The
city of that Lady’s love has been so well destroyed that we still doubt where it was really. And we of
course know destroy rhymes with Troy, or vice versa if you prefer. Troy is the very symbol of a
complete holocaust, so long ago that only our genes can remember it.
“In C,” or maybe in do, is the musical identity of this piece and yet it is so much more. Try to
follow the hammering of the guitar in the back vastly dominated by the harmonious and rebellious
accordion, that is trying to bring to life a heroic story that has difficulty finding its language, but it
comes to a clearing in this forest and the guitar suddenly navigates and sails over the wasteland
while the accordion is crying away what he has not been able to find in the cold, in C, mind you, of
the most banal normal mediocre middle of the way tone. Could do better, major or minor. Let’s get
flat or sharp but let’s get to some modulation. And sure enough, the two instruments try to maybe
find a way out of this rat cage in which they have been locked up too long. But a rabbit home is never
where we would like it to be. So, end of the no-entry street.
And the guitar, alone or double, Or has the accordion turned its voice into a second guitar-
like double and they softly, calmly, but with no exit in this pasture and they go on crying sad moans
in the wings.
And we have to come to the end of this exploration and find out we are just under the horizon
because there is no exit beyond it. If you try to go to the horizon, you will only see it moving further
and further, farther and farther, never-ending its movement away from you as if you were pushing it
away, repelling it in some repulsive rejection. So, you have to stop and just accept to be under this
horizon. The guitar scattering its notes, and the accordion building some binding fabric around the
guitar’s notes. Maybe here and there some echo of sentences you have heard somewhere in another
world. And the horizon closes the story and locks you in its circle all around you, a circle you can
never get out of, and that may even become tighter and tighter.
“Ruht wohl” would John Sebastian Bach sing again, rest your legs after this long trek or trip,
journey maybe. One cannot be one of the three magi every day without having to stop in order to
rest every so often, though not as often as some might wish.
LE CONCERT DE L’HOSTEL DIEU – FOLIA – 2021 – 3241348162386 –
CONCERT DOLCE FOLIA – SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2021, 18:00 PM – SAINT-
VICTOR MONTVIANEIX
The concert was a perfect demonstration that “Folia” or if you prefer craziness, though I would
like better corrugatedness or corrugation, is definitely the most creative really human force and
power. It was of course only the music and the singing. This music is, in fact, the musical part of a
full show that would be a symbiosis of dancing, singing, music, and acting. The show is coming in
December to Clermont Ferrand. It will be then on a tour. Get in touch with the group.
The show’s music had just been recorded and the CD holds the promises of the concert. The
main dance is a tarantella, a dance I have encountered on stage for the first time in Roubaix at the
Ballet du Nord in 1995: only tarantellas danced by the company there in a mixed classical and
modern styles. That was the demonstration that the company that had been in danger of closing up
managed to find a new boss, Maryse Delente, and to go back on the road of creation, associating
the two supposedly hostile styles. The challenge of the salvation of this ballet company by Minister
Jacques Toubon found its fulfillment in these tarantellas. I have never considered tarantellas as

15
crazy, but rather as a dance that is trying to capture the deepest and fastest rhythm that haunts our
psyche and our mind all the time, the music of the superheroes if you want.
And when the tarantella is really long and powerful you little by little, and yet fast, move from
a rather simple and peaceful tempo to something that gets more and more anything you want, and
if you let your own deeper self come out and follow this tempo you will be in a trance in no time, you
will see the spirits on the other side of the cave wall in Les Eyzies or the Chauvet Cave. Tarantellas
are the music of all rituals that try to liberate the deepest self in us and to enable each one of us to
conjugate our liberated selves with those of everyone around, and the liberation becomes a ritualistic
communion in rhythm and music with absolutely no time and no desire to even wonder if it is ethical,
humane, or maybe simply moral to sublimate life into an outlandish track-blazing expedition to
nowhere at all, to the other multiverses that we believe must exist under or over ours. Some physicist
like Michio Kaku practices the tarantella in their own conception of and writings on physics. The
tarantella becomes then the theory of everything and it is one inch away from the gigantic black hole
that will eat the whole universe when the other multiverses decide that our universe has become
obsolete.
The best and most fantastic surprise and discovery are that one composer who spend a lot
of energy trying to compose for crazy people, about crazy people, was the Red-haired priest, Antonio
Vivaldi. The sixth track will even tell you that this tarantella, this corrugated music, these crazy
harmony and tempo are a gift from God, but only when you sleep. God is the inspirator for the
craziest dreams or nightmares you may cultivate regularly in your sleep-imagining that is like
sleepwalking, just unconscious and funny, especially if you suddenly wake up and find yourself
standing on your ten-inch-wide windowsill on the 66th
or 99th
floors of your skyscraper. But I must
admit I like the music of this piece and the divine inspiration it comes from.
But it is high time we go to Naples, Napoli, and merge our tarantella with the Vesuvius who
is promising us another ritualistic dance on smoking ashes and hot lava. And it looks and sounds so
much like the Napoli I visited some time ago, both out of control and yet very well controlled in its
Brownian agitation in the test tube of society moving from the normalcy of a prison to the innovation
of a quantum cesspool in which we can dump our most influential and absurd crazes and fancies.
To go back to Vivaldi is quite a good idea since Baroque music is always in a way pacifying
and out spacey, meaning out in space with no destination and with no possible control of the
trajectory that will end in a black hole for sure. Remember the Space Odyssey 2001? That was 20
years ago. We have gone beyond the concept of a neurotic egocentric computer today. We know
the machines are nothing but machines, but we also know that it does not take an expert hacker to
take it over, the machine, and to transform the Operating System of the machine into an Obsolete
Syndrome, and then the machine is going through a severe case of PTSS, Post Traumatic Senility
Syndrome and if you prefer PTSD, then you definitely are crazy and the syndrome becomes a
disorder, and then you will be institutionalized. You can always tell yourself, Antonio Vivaldi, the red-
haired priest, was composing his tarantellas and his deranged music, his baroque and benevolent
harmony for an institution of women, young women, being educated to hold their fair position in their
society. And Antonio Vivaldi brings up the tears of a poor woman who is losing her heart at the end
of a failed and doomed relationship with who knows who? It does not matter to know it since anyway
what is important is the suffering of the heart of this lady who would not be able to know she is alive
if she was not suffering. As long as the heart is hurting it is alive and well somewhere on this planet.
A last visit to Antonio Vivaldi and his Juditha Triumphans and she thanks God for all she has
done in this life and true enough this Judith has done a lot, so much that her song of thanks to God
sounds like another tarantella on the French market square on Carnival Day, the famous Mardi Gras,
in New Orleans.
We started in Mexico, and we will end in Peru, proving in a way that some of our roots are
from the other side of an ocean. Which one? I don’t know, but we have to cross an ocean if we want
to become creative. In the 13th
century, they built many “Ponts du Diable” (Devil’s Bridges) to cross
rivers. The shape is pointing high into the sky to remain as far as possible from the water because
in these rivers the devil and other witches or fairies are residing trying to catch us when we cross. It
is said that a live newborn could have been enclosed in the construction to protect the bridge against

16
the devil. It is probably a legend, but you can never know how crazy people who dance tarantellas
and bourrées on Devil’s Bridges could – and can – be or become at times.
A beautiful concert and a beautiful CD.
LAURENT MARTIN – COMPOSITRICES D’EXCEPTION – HÉLÈNE DE
MONTGEROULT – CÉCILE CHAMINADE – ARMANDE DE POLIGNAC –
BLANCHE SELVA – MEL BONIS – 2019 – 3487549903417 – CONCERT
TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2021, 20:30 PM, ÉGLISE DE VISCOMTAT
Here the lady composers are all French. Laurent Martin only considers French cases of
women who were at times severely segregated against in the field of music. They could not always
study with the best teachers who were – “of course” – men, but they managed in the cases
considered here in this concert either because they were from wealthy families, or because they
were married to important people like industrialists. But then they had two more hurdles ahead. First,
they could not perform in the top music halls or auditoriums because they were women. Very few
succeeded to have a performing career, and even so they were accepted as performers, not as
composers. Their art was only considered enough for some entertaining episode in a social event
within the “family,” hence only private performances for an audience of relatives and friends. The
next hurdle was to have their music published and thus distributed to people who could perform it.
I once suggested to M. Guy Ramona, the then director of the famous Festival of La Chaise
Dieu that he should organize a concert with female composers only. He answered that there were
not enough of these to fill up a concert, but I think he meant to fill up a concert hall since his festival
is a festival of sacred music, Hildegarde von Bingen was by far big enough to fill up the program of
a concert and since most of her works were already recorded at he time (twenty years ago) it was
not very difficult to get the necessary performers, and anyway it could be a request to one music
group to work on her works for a concert. But still, at the beginning of this 21st
century, sacred music
in an abbey church was attracting more men, accompanied by their wives, than women alone or
accompanied by their husbands.
So, I have followed Laurent Martin for quite many years now and he has presented these
lady composers in concerts here and there, as part of the concerts, or at times as a full concert itself.
Since in this year’s Vollore Concerts, on Tuesday, July 27, he said that he plays them the same way
as he would play gentleman composers, though he noted that some of these ladies are a lot more
precise in the “stage-directions” (performing and interpretation indications) on the score than men
would be. Personally, I would definitely agree to disagree on this idea. I am sure there could be
another way to apprehend their music that I find very cold in many ways the way Laurent Martin
performs it, maybe not cold, but rather distant, slightly too regular, too much the way it is composed.
There should be somewhere some feminine way of looking at the music, of performing it.
But do not let my remark stop you in the proper direction, which is to listen to it, enjoy it.
Cécile Chaminade for example is so contemplative, and she obviously enjoys, her contemplation, or
maybe the simple act of contemplating the world, with some notes at the top right of the keyboard
that sounds like a way to provoke the attention of the audience. That is also something feminine that
should be studied more closely: more than being admired and applauded by the audience, these
women seem to be keen on getting the attention of the audience, making them listen to the detail, to
the notes, to the movement behind and under these notes that are supposed to create an emotion
and not a simple blunt satisfaction that leads to admiration and applauding. Track 6 “Automne” is
quite typical of this constant teasing from the composer, appealing to the audience to notice the
change in tempo, the change in coloration, the change in emotion-creating atmosphere from one
line to the next, from one measure to the next. How can we make this feminine without turning the
composer into some kind of marketplace vendor calling for customers and trying to lure them into
buying her goods? They want to establish a private and intimate connection with the people in the
audience, and these people have to lock themselves onto the music and forget that there may be
hundreds of people around. Each one is receiving the music in their own individual ways. I just
wonder why the next track “Les Sylvains” makes me think these fauns, these elves, are all males

17
and the lady composer is trying to speak to them, to attract their attention, and this appeal definitely
evokes in my mind some teasing, some enticing that is supposed to be directed at me, at one
particular and autonomous listener. I become the fauns, one of these fauns that Cécile Chaminade
is trying to depict and charm.
I must say it is necessary to see the connection of this Armande de Polignac, Armande de
Polignac, comtesse de Chabannes-La Palice (Marie Armande Mathilde; 8 January 1876 – 29 April
1962), the niece of Prince Edmond de Polignac and Princess Winnaretta de Polignac, this latter
woman the patroness of Ravel, Stravinsky, and Milhaud. She studied privately with Eugène
Gigout and Gabriel Fauré, as well as with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. She is thus
connected to one aristocratic family that has survived the two and a half centuries after the French
Revolution. Duke Armand de Polignac is the guide of the visit of the Lavoûte-Polignac castle next to
Le Puy en Velay. Armande de Polignac is far from being the only Polignac with a music career. The
six Preludes and the Nocturne are surprising in some ways due to perfect control of a sober and
well-tempered style, and yet the Nocturne has some passages where tension is to be sensed in the
night that was peaceful at first. But once again the lady composer is trying to captivate the eye and
the ear of individual listeners, calling them into her game, into her depicting of this night that must
contain many fears and maybe some frights that she would like to share with you. She is having an
insomniac experience of her night there or is it maybe an experiment to spend the night without
sleeping. Very impressive, because very impressionistic.
Blanche Selva is an impressionist in music and the two pieces on bells, in the fog or the
sunshine evoke for me a rural capture of clocks and their bells in a village in some mountain, certainly
not in a city. Nothing urban in this capture of clocks that are dictating their rhythm to our lives. It is a
world that had not yet disappeared in the lady composer’s time, but it has vastly disappeared today,
even in small villages since clocks cannot ring after 10 pm and before 7 am, and that is a shame.
Clocks in my village were upgraded to these new modern rules because some people complained
they kept them awake. In the name of the sleep of some citizens bells were muted, in fact just banned
for nine hours every day, in fact, every night. I remember spending a few nights in Rouen across
from the cathedral and the bells rang all hours, half hours, and quarters of an hour. They thus rang
every fifteen minutes. I am not sure muting them was an improvement.
Mel Bonis is an intimate voice totally self-centered and inward-looking. She is a sort of self-
contemplating and meditating soul or mind who thinks about her own inner world and conflicts in
musical terms. I just wonder if she does not make her two hands have a tournament on the keyboard,
a tournament like in the Middle Ages, but Spartacus 1 versus Spartacus 2, or Hecate against Selene
with Diana, the third facet of the triple goddess, as the referee of the competition between the
goddess of hell, or the underworld, or Hades, and the goddess of the night and the moon?
I did not say much about Hélène de Montgeroult because she is absolutely typical of women
in arts, music, painting, sculpture, or any other art that is not centered on needlework or knitting. To
be accepted in the Conservatoire de Paris as a teacher in 1795 when it was created, she improvised
on La Marseillaise in front of the selecting jury. It would be good tomorrow if French politicians dared
try slamming, hip-hopping, or rapping in their public speech. Maybe dance it on Tik Tok. Caressing
the cat in the proper direction and not against its hairy hide might be too populistic, and I must say
Boris Trump or Donald Johnson have never tried this one.
A fair trip in woman’s land. Enjoy it and imagine a time when women’s creativity will be
recognized, but I do hope women devise a way of performing or rendering this music composed by
women, who, mind you, were part of an elite. But even so, they are part of our heritage, and it would
be good to get the coloration and the texture customized.

18
LAURENT MARTIN – CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – PRÉLUDES
LAURENT MARTIN IS THE PERFECT SAVIOR OF THIS TORTURED ALKAN
(Amazon.fr, July 19, 2013)
These Preludes start so soft, so slow, so disdainfully detached that you wonder if we are in
a music academy class for beginners. And yet they find here and there as soon as Prelude number

19
2 some vigor for short periods when the music dances to some popular tune that is ultimately
swallowed up by the nonchalant slowness.
But Alkan is best when he more or less unbinds the two hands and one goes astray in the
high-pitched keys while the other roams slowly on the low-pitched keys and from time to time these
two waves of fingers and notes come together, or closer though with two different tempos that are
officially the same, maybe, but that are intrinsically different. Prelude number 3 is such a dual way
across the keyboard, to and fro, up and down. But this game of playing one hand against the other
is a style in this music. It creates music that is more than impressionistic, cubist music. That music
would have been so well adapted to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, certainly more indeed than
to Renoir’s Déjeuner au bord de l’eau.
Prelude number 5 introduces another element of this style, of this music. The violence of it
and both hands shoot the same way and make the storm of a ferocious mind torture the keys, the
pedals, and the keyboard to express that tempest under a skull, and that violence comes back now
and then in other preludes, like a measure here and there in Prelude number 6 in full contrast with a
tremendous softness the rest of the time, just as if he regretted that violence of a short moment and
tried to cover it up.
And at the same time Prelude number seven could be one of those dances that were the
favorite pieces of the famous Moulin Rouge of Toulouse Lautrec: women, men, and absinth, love
and oblivion. We can see the legs going up and down, and the hand exploring under the table, or
the dress, and yet at the end there is some kind of acceleration that makes it more feline than human.
Prelude number 8 starts as the voice of hell soaring from the deepest pit and high over it, the
small and delicate notes of a bird that tries to live its flying joy without being influenced by the somber,
dark monster that lurks in the depth of this abyss. The spirit of god over the water in which Leviathan
is looking for its next prey. There is something deeply Biblical in this music, and I mean Old
Testament Biblical. The title is of course illuminating in darkness: “Au bord de la mort” (at the edge
of death), note the rhyme or alliteration in this title, and the devilish equilibrium on the divide between
eternal non-life and maybe created life. God almighty is your master, and can you decide when and
where you are going to go?
Prelude number 9 is a delicate and slightly trembling march of tin soldiers in the nursery that
gets slightly shadier but not too much, just enough to maybe imagine a dark soul in the cupboard or
under the bed. But Prelude number 10 brings the devil out of its box, the Jack out of his closet, and
a “danse macabre” starts on the chest of the poor child who was dreaming of some Never-Never-
Land, of some Peter Pan and Tinker Bell before time, though it is Captain Hook and the Crocodile
who are the masters of this dreamlike world.
Prelude number 11 brings some calmer circular dancing or is it some erring, ranting, and
raving in an unknown landscape? Prelude number 12 pacifies the rage of that flight, and the mood
becomes more serene, maybe anxious but not too frightful even if now and then there is a doubt
especially in the last notes that do not know where they stand.
Prelude number 13 then can reopen the box of the peaceful detached notes going up and
down like an exercise for a child but there is some nostalgia in this tune, this melody that plays on
the half tones that modulate the minor into the major. But in the end, a new variation of the same
tune brings slightly more serenity, and the sounds are made darker in hue and minor variations that
question the possibility of some calm serendipity in this mysterious landscape that evades
characterization, is closed to the eyes and dull to the ears. Just maybe take it as a lullaby and go to
sleep with a slight fever to make you float over your bed wrapped up in your eiderdown.
Prelude number 14 is more vivacious, and we go back to some turning whirling melody and
tune that nevertheless slows down and then catches up again as if the music was following its own
rhythm before suddenly taking some heavy power that starts hammering the notes into your skull as
if the rolling movement was becoming more martial rocking left and right and this power dissolves
into some renewed but slower spinning. The music is back to being a simple twirling top on a
mahogany table.

20
Prelude number 15 is deliciously tender and soft with just some rushing notes that take the
upper hand for a few measures, but not long. Let’s go back to the soft sugary tone that yet gets
denser to soften again. A daydream in the wind between oblivion and some parent that just issues
one dark note to remind that child, that music to behave. Isn’t that parent God himself?
Prelude number 16 is even much more tamed, and literally on a leash, some notes pull slightly
now and then but in vain. Let you walk the street with your master one step at a time and no erratic
rush. And it is starting all over again with such a subtle change in tone that you seem to forget time
may elapse during this strolling walk. Prelude number 17 stretches that impression even more,
though a sudden gust of breeze, not wind, just a throatful of breath, ends in a gasp to go back again
to peace and quiet. But an emergency is always there when you don’t expect it with an echo of a
Concerto by Beethoven, the Emperor I may think, that dissolves into some tempest-free calm.
Prelude number 18 becomes adult again and the grown-up man looks at the world, looks for
something that might attract his eyes or his ears. But the show is empty, and the stage reveals
nothing. Maybe over there in the distance the right hand is trying to mesmerize you with an alternative
high-pitched phrase, but it is only a phrase, and the beholder goes back to his calm, though maybe
some animation in him could reveal he misses something, he lacks something, he wants something
but that is only… And the high-pitched notes come back, the bird is singing again but the attraction
seems to be finished and the beholder goes back to his secluded armchair with maybe one or two
notes hanging in the air flattened by two deeply hammered notes.
Prelude number 19 is torn up by the same attraction to the top and the retaining pull down to
the bottom. Prelude number 20 becomes impatient. Let’s go out, let’s be violent, let’s crush this
outside world. Violence up and down, up mostly, down essentially, because it has to come down
after arising slightly, and the violence is so terrorizing, and you can’t go, you can’t escape these deep
notes that are just bound in so many binds around your neck, ties in a score and railroad ties all
ending up in one tie, and bonds that could be financial or sentimental, all of those holding you down
to the earth, down under in a dungeon in some underground oubliette.
Prelude number 21 then can give you the delicate lace of clearly detached notes on a vague
and soft background. The tone on top is like a childish rigmarole that becomes softer and softer till it
ends in immobility.
Prelude number 22 is the enjoyment of this immobility. The patient is in bed enjoying his dull
senses and his erased emotions. There might be some vigor lower deeper in him but this violence
that tries to come out is, in the end, refrained and put back in its blind cage. It could be some guilty
pilgrimage, some penitent’s purifying way, and yet there is some torturing deep blackness in the hole
over which the patient is hovering without falling into it, though he might be attracted by the fall, but
he just can’t.
Prelude number 23 brings some light and delicateness to this dark landscape. A nice little
clear dance of some ladies, they have to be ladies since they are so light, so dainty on their tiptoes.
Would it not be wonderful to go along with this delicacy and charm? But it starts all over again and
in vain in a way, getting shorter maybe, impatient, but no way: I won’t go, says the beholder.
Prelude number 24 reminds me of Chopin and one of his waltzes, the one about some little
dog running after its tail. That was about the only person, man mind you, Alkan was attracted to, but
Chopin had another pussycat on his mind and that pussycat smoked the cigar and wore pants and
leather boots. No luck, poor Alkan, Chopin had both sides of the coin in one person. And Alkan can
always go back home to his refuge.
Prelude number 25 starts like a tolling bell and develops as such into a deadly fatal lethal
funeral march. Who is Alkan burying? No one but himself of course in his reclusion and probably the
Talmud that says horrible things in Leviticus about some desires that lurk and crawl deep in your
mind or mental derangement, because it has to be derangement. So, try to get salvation by
translating the Talmud from Hebrew into a less divine language. But never mind, death will come
soon, and you will be at peace finally, and forever and ever.

21
In these preludes, Alkan seems to depict his life torn between his desires and his fears, and
the latter win and push his desires away, in fact, bury them deep underground which means under-
mind in fact, and that could mean craziness and insanity if there were no Talmud to translate, and
he will burn it all just before dying showing how little he believed in fact and how much he expected
some control of his inner storms from such a pointless activity. Luckily, he had music and he left
behind a monument to his crucified inner life.
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – VINCENZO MALTEMPO – GRANDE
SONATE
MORE SUPERB THAN MAJESTIC, SIMPLY SUBLIME
(Amazon.fr July 20, 2013)
To be 20 is enough in itself and then, never mind. As long as you are 20 you can gallop and
gallop again along the road of discovery. You will always find something to stop you, even to arrest
you, and you will contemplate it for a while. And Alkan is multi-rhythmic with each hand having their
own tempos, till the left hand tells the right hand to slow down and maybe contemplate. The right
hand obeys, and a silence precedes the contemplation during which the left hand is trying to follow
but can’t really, to the point of stopping completely and the right hand can start trotting along with
the pleasure that contemplation is bringing to it. What on earth can that right hand be contemplating?
The left hand is providing some slow tempo and the right hand once finished contemplating, goes
back to its galloping like a deranged frightened rat. And nothing will stop it for sure. The left hand
just has to follow and try to build some kind of harmony that the right hand evades any time it wants.
It is really a good thing to be 20. You can do more or less what you want and fully follow any folly at
all.
To be 30 is a lot more dramatic. You have aged and you have done plenty of things, but you
have nothing left on your hands, except maybe some blood if you have gone to war. You can try to
gallop again but you are not able to do that anymore So you start brooding, plotting, demanding,
requiring, requesting from anyone and any lord of this earth and life to give you what you can’t get
all by yourself because you are now a middle-aged man and that is not good to go flirting with the
wind of sexual desire. But Faust is not far away. So, let’s ask him for guidance. He has the key to
the door to Mephistopheles’ fortress and temple. And for sure you can get what you want. There is
a condition, but who cares about it. What is important is to have access to unknown knowledge,
unreachable knowledge, unreachable pleasures. Welcome, Mr. Lucifer. I am so glad to be meeting
you. There is some calm jubilation in this movement with just a few recollections of what it was to be
young. Sometimes in the middle of the way you may ask a question, wonder what you will, in the
end, get out of the deal, but that is no rebellion, just doubt, maybe fear to be rigged, fooled, trapped,
stolen, hijacked to a catastrophe. But serendipity brings some serenity and exhilaration. Doubt will
go on forever but as long as we have the sugar of the excitement and entertainment, we will ask the
keyboard to provide the scales and the notes needed to enjoy in peace, detached notes, somber for
sure, but in fact, they are only very tired of running up and down. Maybe they can rest in the shade
of a tree or a room with closed shutters and blinds rolled down. Then there might be some return of
some violent desire, dissatisfaction, discontent, but it will bring some balanced harmony and calmer
melody that will bring us to the acme of enjoyment. The enjoyment of what we know is perverse, but
the perversion is hiding far behind the front of the melody, of the right hand. The left hand is definitely
the wrong one, the bad one, the menacing one, the hand of the devil, though it is the hand of the
heart. And some echo from big granddaddy Beethoven will close the drama.
To be 40 is maybe happy when you live with a calm partner, and the music is a lot slower,
and the right hand is jubilant while the left hand is peacefully pacing behind. The couple, because it
is a couple, is happily married and united in some oily calm up at sea where there is no wind but a
light breeze, no hurricane, no tempest, no tsunami. What a nice cruise under the pale sun of autumn.
A pale sun anyway. But I am sure it is the fall because of the trajectory we have followed so far. And
of course, there is some serious time to gather the harvests and to valorize the incoming revenues
and profits. To be 40 is the age of profitable balances in your life. Be sure you do not forget some
negative assets and you don’t over-value the positive ones. An overvalued asset is like poison, like

22
a rotten apple in the basket. But at 40 you have reason and security in your thinking, behaving, and
counting your golden pieces. You can then rest on the living-room sofa. In those days it was called
a sitting-room or even a withdrawing-room to which only the males of the household could unite in
cigar smoke and whisky fumes. And that moves slowly to some smooth ending that will have to be
a flat line one day since we all are flat-liners sooner or later. But at 40 you just eventually think of it,
but it has to be for later. So let the gentle wavelets caress the beach and the sand of this comfortable
equanimous pleasure-soaked life of the fully satisfied adult of 40. And Alkan makes this season of
life the longest because enjoyment and pleasure make time last longer. We forget about time and
only enjoy duration; We have gone back to being nothing but a molecule, a planet in this cosmos
that does not count time but is carried away by duration, though at the end of this season we can
hear nearing fate bang its fists on the door.
To be 50 is to get ready for the big voyage. It starts just like that. Man, there is nothing left to
expect. It is all dark, somber, shady, shadowy, tenebrous and the left hand tells us what to think. The
right hand then does not have the slightest vigor to run, even to trot. It is even here and there
becoming the echo, the accompaniment of the powerful hammering left hand and its isolated notes
tolling like a death bell, telling us the clock has stopped or is not far from stopping. And going up the
keyboard is not exactly easy. The poor man is exhausted despite all the regrets that are squirming
deep in him. You can always regret, there is not one chance these regrets will be anything else but
regrets of something you can’t do anymore, something you have not done and will not be able to do.
Listen to the hammering of destiny that is not a female, not even a witch, but the worst possible
monster. This season, winter, of course, is dedicated to Prometheus chained on his rock and who is
nothing but fodder for eagles, renewable and thus ecological fodder for eagles and other predators,
I guess. You stole some knowledge from Mephistopheles and then you enriched yourself with that
knowledge and now you are punished by the gods who are making you suffer forever your lot that
will never end because it is out of time and when we cannot measure time there is no beginning and
no end. Prometheus met Dracula on his rock and has been made eternal by that Draculean god and
transformed into a plain food store for little vampires of later centuries. True blood indeed.
The Symphony for solo piano is unluckily not full, only four movements. The fourth movement
first, an allegro moderato has some problem getting started. The engine brake must have been kept
on. We feel thus the revving up of the engine in the poor man who wants to go running after the sun,
but he has shackles on his legs. He needs some good prison break to get free. But this contained
energy creates a sentiment of reserve, an impression of restraint that is not very common with Alkan.
So, we can wonder if that restraint is not alienation if that reserve is not enslavement, but from some
outside authority. Systematically the right hand starts a musical sentence, and the left hand finishes
it, and we can wonder which one is pulling the other back and down. The right hand opens up an
eye from time to time and looks outside but the left hand closes the shutters and brings the right
hand back into the room, back into the track and trail that leads nowhere really. The right hand can
rebel some, not much, not too much, just some but what can it do when the fetters from the left hand
are so powerful. We find here the best of Alkan’s art. He treats the two hands as two different
instruments who have their own logic, their own tempos, or should I say tempi, their own alienations,
and their own limits but no sir, mister master sir, you will not escape the left hand’s control and
tyranny or is it just the weight and gladiator’s net of the lower part of the keyboard. A last moment of
rebellion, of hope, of imagination, of expectation, but no, you cannot break the bars of your prison.
You are to stay within the limits of your dungeon.
The fifth movement is necessarily a death march, funeral march, danse macabre. And you
can hear the slow pacing of the horses pulling the hearse. And you go down, down, into the benighted
depth of the big hole in which you are going to be thrown, rejected, disposed of. And the slow pacing
of the horses again. Alkan’s technique to play one hand against the other is so beautifully cut up into
a cubist construction that we feel this music should have been composed in the middle of the 20th
century, but no, man, boy or whatever, it was composed in the deepest and stickiest romantic time,
when everyone was crying for the past and cultivating ruins in their public or private gardens and
parks. So, the right hand just makes up its heart and decides to stand up to that ritual with serenity
and tranquility and placidity and even repose, after all, Rest In Peace, Rip Van Winkle, in the quiet
of the tomb or the burial chamber that looks so much like your own sick man’s chamber.

23
The next movement is a menuetto, so says Alkan, but it is, in fact, the Danse Macabre of all
the bones in the sepulcher of that poor man. They dance their welcoming parade, but they can’t
really be very creative since they only remember a few notes and a couple of steps. So, they seem
to be singing, playing, and dancing an extended version of a bolero, till at least the newcomer gives
them a little bit of a wider melody. After all, he is bringing some music from the outside world, outside
the death chamber of course. But that turns rapidly to two or three notes turning around and around
after a last attempt at opening the range. The bones tell the man what he has to do, and he has
nothing to expect except marching, or dancing if he prefers, in line like a row of soldiers going to die
in the war. And he must not forget he is already dead. Dead sir, mister master sir, you are the slave
of death, so stop pretending. And he answers of course positively.
And we come to the Finale that goes back to the brilliant virtuoso style of the composer and
performer. At least a little bit and the cavalcade is getting crazy and gallops down the big avenues
to some target, destination, goal that no one knows. The importance of running is in the running itself;
I just wonder if this movement is not a pastiche, a mockery of numerous pieces of the 19th
-century
romantics that Alkan drags down into the mud of excess: look what is left when you run like blind
crazy animals who have lost all consciousness of their fate. You can run in big or small circles. You
will anyway not be able to escape the corral that does not even have a door. The bulls are running
after the picadors, but the picadors have wings, and the bull is rather fooled and tricked.
To finish we have the third of the “Trois Grandes Etudes pour mains séparées et réunies,”
(Three Large Studies for separate and joined hands) precisely the one for both hands after the first
one for the left hand and the second one for the right hand, or vice versa. I will regret not having the
three. Supposedly the one for the left hand is a real killer. I can’t know because I am not a pianist. I
am a pedestrian. We have once again the two hands chasing each other but it sounds too abstract
to me like some Juan Gris’s cubist collage that does not pretend to represent anything except maybe
grey and triangles except if you look very hard and then you just wonder if what you see is not just
that, what YOU see.
LAURENT MARTIN – CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ESQUISSES op. 63
WAKE UP THE TIRED AND THE BORED
(Amazon.co.uk, July 18, 2013)
Forty-nine pieces in seventy-five minutes. Alkan was the man of speedy music. Get on it,
start, rush, stop, get off it. Only one piano which means very limited instrumental possibilities, and
yet Alkan seems to be able to multiply the technicalities and the particularities and the dissimilarities
and similarities between a piano and the weather in any season that can change in five minutes
especially in tempest time from a ray of sunshine to a windstorm or a hurricane. And at times there
is a short moment of absolute calm on the ocean.
You can shift – and that's the proper word because that music is a body-shifter – from a piece
that is good enough for some learners in early years since the notes are separate, clean, and clear,
the hands are well-coordinated, and it is all a question of tempo to keep the proper length of the
notes and their proper intensity from beginning to end. Learn how to temper your notes, your tempo,
your hands, your keyboard and keys on the keyboard, your pedals, and whatever can be used in the
piano. Alkan's Esquisses are an everlasting and never finished piano class for he or she or it who or
which would like to learn that instrument.
On the other hand, some are so absolutely impossible to play, luckily most of them are short,
very short, that even the best expert, the best talent cannot really get into it, and we feel virtuoso-
wise frustrated. Something is missing. Mr. Alkan was composing for himself and since he was a
recluse no one really knows how many fingers he had. But his reclusion is probably the cause and
explanation of such myriads of small pieces. He must have been composing small pieces all day
long and probably on the piano directly. That means he must have composed thousands more but
since in those days there were no recorders (except of course the wind instrument), we have no
trace of all that jungle of music he must have been living in all the time.

24
He was a recluse for another reason. He dedicated his life to the study and translation of the
Talmud because he was Jewish, and as a matter of fact, rather deeply involved in the Word of God,
in the Word of the unnamable supreme being. Orthodox, maybe, in the line of the Qumran community
on the Dead Sea I guess dedicating his life to communicating with the sacred, the Holy Spirit. He
was living in the third ultimate level of purity, that of total dedication to music and God, and music
must have been the voice of God. None of the two other inferior levels of purity were for him thinkable,
imaginable, acceptable, be it matrimony or estrangement from women. Strangely enough, these
three levels imply sex but do not quote it, so that estrangement from women does not mean
estrangement from men, though for Alkan it did, and matrimony does not specify the gender of the
two partners and Alkan had a liking for Chopin, but Chopin was more than deeply engaged and
involved with fiery George Sand (a woman, or a gorgon, as is well known), 80 Rue Taitbout in Paris.
A strange character indeed but his music will never bore you because it has no time to be
boring and every single measure of every single piece is so different from the previous one that you
seem to be going through constant change and contrast, at times infuriatingly. But do not expect to
go to sleep with and on it.
CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ORGAN WORKS VOL.1
ALKAN USES THE ORGAN TO AIR HIS DEEPEST FIGHTS FOR FREEDOM
(Amazon.co.uk, July 20, 2013)
The Benedictus is a forest of sounds and impressions in which the underbrush seems to be
dominant for some time in the beginning before some aria rises in the medium high-pitched range
on this background of some kind of continuo in the lower range. A repetitive seesaw sound in the
back resonates like some menacing body of hostile feelings and people besieging the Benedictus
that never manages to come up and out from this undergrowth and yet. We recognize Alkan by the
fact that he manages to use the organ as a full orchestra or at least like several autonomous
instruments, working feet and hands as separate entities. He thus can have four musicians on the
organ. The result is that the Christian very traditional and important ritual moment of the benediction
in the mass is sort of diverted from its purity, from its concentration and the listeners do not have the
means to get elevated the way they should be. Alkan is, in a way, trying to confront these Christian
rituals with a world that is hostile or indifferent. Go on speaking. We do not listen. And it reaches a
deafening brutal end. I just wonder if he did not project what he was experiencing as a Jew onto this
Christian moment of communion he breaks up into shrapnel and smithereens.
The Etudes d'Orgue ou de Piano à Pédales (Organ or Pedal Piano Studies), numbers one to
six are surprising since he does not use the keyboard but only the pedals. They have a general
sound range that remains somber and dark, never getting any clarity or virtuoso melodious finger
structures since the organist can only press two pedals at the same time, at the most two with each
foot simultaneously. In their range, they can nevertheless get some power, but that power is crushing
you down to the earth or at least into your chair. The third one for instance becomes menacing,
dangerous. We are the prey, and the organ is the predator. We can hear the foot-activated pedals
running after us. Crushingly beautiful but can we survive that feeling of being rolled down by some
eight-wheeler?
The fourth Etude tries to associate the powerful register and the fuzzier and softer underbrush
of the less powerful register. This then sounds like a fight between the two that does not really give
the advantage to the one or the other till the end when the powerful mood sounds a few notes to
close the flight. The fifth Etude is in the powerful register and the darkness and menacing tone of it
is not chasing us but rather whirling and turning around us, surrounding us with twirling notes and
sentences. We are caught in the net till some furry melody tries to get us lost in its aimless direction-
less roaming and then we move to some other range but only to go back to a violent and powerful
end. The sixth and last Etude is calmer, softer, and seems to get lost in some deep distance as if we
were hearing it through thick walls and many windows, from outside the church maybe, or in the
closed-up narthex. It is disquieting and quite long so that the discomfort goes on for a while and in
that dulled sound we try to organize some kind of hunt between the notes, the registers, and a little

IN MOUNTAIN CHURCHES, LONG LIVE MUSIC FESTIVALS

IN MOUNTAIN CHURCHES, LONG LIVE MUSIC FESTIVALS

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