Chagall et la musique

Conference:

The painter Marc Chagall was very sensitive to music. Throughout his life, he punctuated his paintings with violinists and animal musicians. But he also made opera sets and costumes. So many violins in Chagall's paintings! The instrument is part of his family history: he was born in July 1887 in a Hasidic Jewish family in Vitebsk, Belarus, his brother played the mandolin and his uncle the violin. In the Hasidic tradition - a movement advocating the renewal of Judaism - music, dance and trance are ways of accessing the divine. Certain figures from his youth would become archetypes and populate his paintings, such as the festive klezmer orchestra (musical tradition of Ashkenazi Jews), the bird, symbol of inspiration, or the violinist, who represents the wandering Jew. In 1985, Marc Chagall, the last patriarch of the Côte d’Azur after Matisse and Picasso, died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in his ninety-eighth year. The School of Paris can be proud of having allowed many foreign artists to flourish within it: Chagall is one of its most unique pioneers. “Drunk on images,” said Malraux, who commissioned him to paint the ceiling of the Paris Opera. The man who painted the world of the Jewish “shtetl” in Vitebsk, but also his dreams, his loves, the world of the circus, and the universal message of the Bible, remains today the marvelous storyteller of a universal and timeless poetics, based on the canonical image of God and men.

Concert:

To look at Chagall is to hear klezmer music bursting forth from the painting: the hopping crincrins of weddings, the plaintive melodies of Yiddish piccolos and clarinets? Joy is the warp, sorrow the weft. A music that also squeezes the heart.

“MUSIC RISES IN THE EAST..!” »

A journey to the sound of KLEZMER…

If Michel Lethiec travels and records the entire classical and modern repertoire of the clarinet, from Mozart, Brahms… to Penderecki.., he is also passionate about this music of traditional inspiration of which his instrument is the essential interpreter, and has recorded on CD ‘’Jewish Life by Ernest Bloch’’ (with Itamar Golan) and “The tears and prayers of Isaac the blind”, for klezmer clarinet and string quartet by Oswaldo Golijov (with the Artis Quartet, first live recording). In the company of the accordionist Sabine Giordano, he offers you a varied, colorful program, mixing original works and works inspired by the traditions and customs of Central Europe… Music of dances and nostalgia, of celebrations, of exile or of hope…

Kovacs: “ Sholem-Alekhem, Rov Feidman! “ and Armenian Lament and Dance ….
Pedro Iturralde: Suite Hellenique, Granville Bantok: ‘’Hamabdil ‘’
Ernest Bloch: “Prayer “
Uri Tzion .. Halleluya ..Donna Donna..Ki Mitziyon … The blessing Nigun…Let’s be happy …
and many others…

Performers:

Michel Lethiec (clarinet)
A renowned teacher, he is Professor at the Conservatoire de Nice, Honorary Professor at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, regularly gives master classes in major foreign institutions, and is the guest of international competition juries. He has created numerous pieces and concertos, reserving an important place for them in his discography of around thirty recordings. Artistic director of the legendary Pablo Casals Festival in Prades from 1980 to 2020, and founder of its Chamber Music Academy, he welcomed the greatest international soloists and their students every summer, around original programs also presented at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris and in several other international capitals. Michel Lethiec is a knight in the National Order of Merit and in the Order of Arts and Letters.

Sabine Giordano (accordion)
She completed her studies with the First Prize of the City of Paris in 1998 and in 1999 the First Prize for Improvement unanimously from the City of Paris. Passionate about teaching, she holds the State Diploma of Accordion as well as the University Diploma of Intervening Musician (DUMI). Recruited in 2016 at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Nice, she leads musical projects in schools in the City of Nice in partnership with the National Education. In 2018, under the will of Mr. Thierry MULLER Director of the CRR of Nice, she created the Accordion class.