The "Goldbergs", a masterpiece by Jean-Sébastien Bach, are revisited through dance with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and through images with "Visions Goldberg" by Irina Lankova and Isabelle Françaix.
The myth of the "Goldberg Variations" that they were commissioned from Johann Sebastian Bach by Count von Keyserling and performed in the anteroom by his pupil Johann Gottlieb Goldberg to soothe his insomnia has been widely spread. First, because the work does not bear a dedication, which was commonplace between a composer and his patron, and the Bach estate does not mention any donation from von Keyserling. As for Goldberg, talented harpsichordist though he was, he was only 13 years old in 1740, at the time of their composition, and it is unlikely that he was able to interpret this absolute pinnacle of music. classic. But if the twenty-first century does not like beautiful stories, the listener of today nevertheless remains that these 30 variations framed by two identical arias can plunge him into a second state, close to the hypnosis, so much the genius of the contrapuntal writing, the perfection of the proportions and the power of the affects carry it to another degree of itself. And when the initial aria resonate again, identical and completely transformed by the extraordinary journey, it seems that everything here below is destined to remain the same.
It is no coincidence that in these troubled times, we hear them again a lot, and for this month of September under the fingers of two talented Russian pianists, Pavel Koleskikov, who accompanies the personal solo dedicated to them by choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker ( read below), and Irina Lankova for a multimedia creation that opens her Max Festival on September 17. Covid obliges, it will have been necessary to wait a year to see these "Goldberg Visions" which were to celebrate the thousand years of the Romanesque church of Tourinnes-la-Grosse, in Walloon Brabant. It is the church itself which sealed the collaboration of Irina Lankova and the photographer and videographer Isabelle Françaix when she visited it for a documentary on the Max Festival. “It's almost a matrix!” She recalls fondly. "This thousand-year-old church tells something about timelessness, about the intimate resonance of time. I told myself that we had to do a show there that tells that. Irina then told me about the 'Goldbergs' that she is. she had been working for a while. "
Meeting between East and West
Very inspired by the Yi Jing, the "Book of Changes", which gave birth three thousand years ago to Chinese ideograms, Isabelle Françaix proposed to cross the Western tradition embodied by Bach, where numbers, like a good Pythagorean than he was, betray the quest for harmony, with the 8 trigrams combining full lines (yin) and broken lines (yang) that make up the 64 hexagrams of Chinese writing. And, that's good, Bach's "Variations" and their two arias are 32 in number. In addition, each trigram evokes an element of nature - fire, water, earth, sky, wind, thunder, mountain, mist - which provides the framework for the 32 short films that Isabelle Françaix shot to accompany each piece of music. These predominantly black and white films have the timeless beauty of prints and in no way reflect what the music expresses. "It is a meeting between two cultures over time, but not a theory", specifies Isabelle Françaix. "I want the public to be forced to look at the image as little as possible. My ideal would even be that they allow themselves to close their eyes and not look at what is happening. You have to live things: they There is no obligatory meaning. The image does not illustrate, it is a resonance. "
For the pianist Irina Lankova, who we will see playing the "Goldbergs" live and appearing on the screen like a sylph simply dressed in a linen sheet, the exercise was far from being simple.. "If we made a dialogue between Debussy and nature, that would go without saying, but with baroque music, the pulse is constant and rapid. When we did the first editing tests with the films, I felt that everything was too stuck in my game. I had to give myself space and time, and we managed to find an identical pulse. " Behind her computer, the videographer will still be able to slightly adapt the course of her films, projected large behind the pianist at the keyboard. History to adjust in real time to hope to suspend time.
L’Echo / Xavier Flament / 08.31.2021