Le Balcon

Le Balcon performs Grisey’s Les Chants de l’Amour. Maxime Pascal, an admirer and connoisseur of Grisey’s work, conducts this major piece of the contemporary repertoire in the main auditorium of the Lille Opera House, which has been cleared of its seats for the occasion.

Les Chants de l’Amour was first performed in 1985, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture. It is a work for twelve voices, to which is added a thirteenth electronic voice created by Grisey himself, which ‘envelops’ the human voices like ‘amniotic fluid’, in the composer’s own words. We witness a dialogue between the different vocal ranges and this thirteenth voice, which gradually learns to sing words of love in every language and the names of famous lovers, taken from Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela.

Visual © Francisco Pez