In Vézelay, music and team spirit

Spectators clapping tirelessly before rising as one to give the artists a standing ovation and shout endless bravos... This Saturday, August 23rd, in the afternoon, in the Saint-Germain des Vault-de-Lugny church, the Viva la Gracia! concert presented by The Alkymia ensemble won over the audience at the Rencontres musicales de Vézelay. An audience sensitive to the musicians' energy, to their infectious joy in playing and singing this ancient and contemporary repertoire from Latin America – notably from Bolivia and Peru. A collection of festive and cheerful pieces, sometimes also somber when they bear witness to the condition of black populations whose memory still bears the imprint of centuries of slavery.

From the Spanish Golden Age, colonization, and Christian missions tasked with evangelizing the "locals" to the contemporary era, sacred and secular songs have celebrated the nativity, speaking of love, pain, fleeting joy, and impossible dreams. " She raised all the whites with great joy, but there, in the slave quarters, her little black child was suffering ," we hear in a traditional Brazilian song that was later popularized in Portugal. It evokes a woman with " wrinkled skin and frizzy white hair " who " rocks the master's white child "...

Yet these poignant moments overflow with sap and strength and soon give way to an imperious desire for life and light. Nothing weighs down or gets bogged down, everything "pulses" and bounces back, like a beating heart.

Under the eloquent direction of Mariana Delgadillo Esponiza, the musicians demonstrate a team spirit that excites the audience, as does the perfect dramaturgy of the program, where the works flow seamlessly into one another.

It's hard to resist the ease with which they accompany the music with a supple and swaying choreography, combining their talents: the ten singers don't need to be asked twice to play castanets or drums, while their fellow instrumentalists (guitars, flute or doulciane, harpsichord and organ, etc.) lend their voices here and there. Are we attending a concert or are we not rather transported to a village square, somewhere between a religious procession and an improvised street performance?

America again, the same Saturday, in the Basilica of Vézelay. But the North this time, thanks to one of the most famous representatives of the repetitive movement, the composer Philip Glass (born in 1937). It is hisAnother Look at Harmony (1975) that Léo Warynski, at the head of the ensemble Les Métaboles , has chosen to share with the audience at the Rencontres musicales. Or, more precisely, the fourth part for choir and organ, of this fresco prefiguring the emblematic Einstein on the Beach created in Avignon in July 1976.

As a few hours earlier at the Vault-de-Lugny, the magic of the performance rests largely on the cohesion, the very fusion, between the performers: eighteen virtuoso singers and the remarkable organist Denis Comtet, whose precision and concentration cannot allow for the slightest deviation. A seamless sequence of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic cells that vary imperceptibly like the subtle shades of blue in the sea or the sky, the work demands tremendous mastery from the conductor.

As for the voices, they combine instrumental objectivity, absolute accuracy, but also a form of expressiveness, albeit contained. This jagged mechanism must, however, never become robotic or disembodied, but remain human and vibrant. A challenge superbly met by the artists.

Léo Warynski and his musicians recorded Another Look last year, following a residency at the Cité de la Voix in Vézelay. This in-depth exploration allows them to demonstrate a fascinating ease today. It's also a wonderful idea to begin the concert by "building" the vocal collective before our eyes and ears, during a first piece of sober and captivating beauty, a canon by the 18th-century Italian composer and music theorist, Andrea Basily.

Individually, the nine singers, then the nine singers of Les Métaboles, enter the stage, their voices adding one after the other. They are then ready to immerse themselves, together, in the hypnotic swirls of Philip Glass.