In Geneva, Les Athénéennes honor infernal music

Originally, Les Athénéennes was set up with a deep desire to break down barriers. “We wanted to bring together different styles of music, to decompartmentalize attitudes, audiences, typical programming,” explains RTS Audrey Vigoureux, founder and co-director of the Les Athénéennes festival with Marc Perrenoud and Valentin Peiry.

These three pianists offer for this 11th edition a few concerts in direct reference to Dante’s “The divine comedy”, but would above all like to question or illustrate the Dantesque themes around the music of hell, imperfect music.

“More than all the other senses, it is hearing that Dante brings out the most in his observations of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and especially through music”, thus indicates Giovanni Boccaccio in the biography that it devotes to the Italian poet. The Athenian women therefore wanted to question what remains in our time of the musical “categories” that Dante described in the 14th century.

A dense program

Among the expected arrivals in Geneva are notably the flamenco singer Estrella Morente with the Appassionato orchestra conducted by Mathieu Herzog, the star of the French piano, David Fray, in recital with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a concert punctuated by extracts from ” The Divine Comedy’ read by Italian actress Chiara Muti and the Modigliani Quartet playing Schubert. The Jupiter Ensemble and the soprano Léa Desandre in the Vivaldi program of their latest album, acclaimed by international critics, is also on the bill, as is the Geneva Chamber Orchestra conducted by the young and very talented Lucie Leguay, I Giardini playing Fauré and Caroline Shaw (2013 Pulitzer Prize).

On the jazz side are announced among others the famous singer of Korean origin Youn Sun Nah and the Amazing Keystone Big Band with the divine singer Célia Kameni in a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald.

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In the contemporary register, we can note the world creation of the composer Jules Matton, given by leading chamber musicians around the pianist Frank Braley or the Bela Quartet accompanied by the electric guitarist Marc Ducret in a revisited “Lyrical Suite” by Berg.

Versant rock are to follow the group Aquaserge who meets the Canadian singer Kyrie Kristmanson, the French-speaking pop-folk singer Billie Bird or the virtuoso showman of modular synthesizers and electro Boodaman.

Interview by Pierre Philippe Cadert

Web adaptation: olhor

^{Festival “les Athénéennes”, Geneva, until June 11, 2022.}