Two compositions by Claude Vivier, including Shiraz, one of his most famous, for piano, and Journal, which is rarely performed, but is the quintessence of his poetics, where dream and life are combined. In 1977, having returned from Bali and Thailand, Vivier traveled to Iran, and notably to Shiraz. Back in Canada, he composed Shiraz, a brilliant, virtuosic work for piano, craggy like the “diamond in the rough” to which the composer likened the southern Iranian city. Composed the same year, Journal is his Journal of a journey to the Orient. Yet Asia completely disappears and the journey becomes that of existence: childhood, its dances and songs, the figure of the mother and her desperate quest, the fear of the dark… “Writing music is to try to do what the gods do.”

Screening of the film of the opera Kopernikus The concert will be preceded by a screening of Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus, directed by Peter Sellars, filmed in December 2018 at the Espace Cardin-Portrait Festival d’Automne à Paris. Directed by David Daurier.

Laurent Feneyrou