High necessity

2010, 2011, 2014

In 2010, Thierry Pécou created the project High Necessity – establishing a dialogue between Western classical music and traditional inspiration. This was the first project for Ensemble Variances and it set a principle approach that has become the Ensemble’s trademark  and which has formed the foundation of the edifice of its work, alongside themes drawn from the traditions Thierry’s home country of Martinique.

"I wanted to find a territory that represented the urgency of reconciliation between traditional music and written music. With its unique history, Martinique was the right place". Charged with emotion, the composer questions the colonial approach to the arrival and imposition of classical music, through a musical dialogue with the singer and Martinican multi-instrumentalist Dédé Saint-Prix. This project is the result of their encounter and is based in particular on chouwal bwa (traditional Martinican merry-go-round music) and on the repertoire of drums and songs typical of the island of flowers.

Tremendum – Mexico is celebrating

2010, 2011, 2012, 2014

There is something very powerful coming from the cultures devastated by the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The great civilizations of ancient Mexico left a mark in the minds of people, in their relationship to the cosmic and biological rhythm of nature and the earth.

A Franco-Mexican programme developed with Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, Tremendum carries the ubiquitous notion of celebration, tinged with a scathing irony, typical of the pre-Columbian heritage. Particularly focused on the tradition of street music, the intercultural dialogue was coupled with a meeting between Ensemble Variances and Percussions Claviers de Lyon for a journey rich in colours, exported to the Cervantino festival in Mexico... and to Metz Arsenal!

Cry by cry

2013, 2015

Call-out cry, cry of pain, cry of terror, cry of anguish, erotic cry... at what point do they turn from involuntary emotional expression into musical material?

Thierry Pécou collaborated with the American composer Lisa Bielawa to question the primordial cry and all the variations that result from it. A musician freed from the dominant minimalist style current in the United States, Lisa Bielawa breathes a spatial dimension into her work that is reminiscent of the great American territories. This program presents a very wide variety of atmospheres; Lisa explores all possible ranges of screams. She practices this in her work objectively, without it coming from a place of anxiety. Les Machines désirantes (Desiring Machines), an earlier work by Thierry Pécou reflects (mirrors) this universal gesture through a philosophical perspective (look), borrowed from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Outre-mémoire

(Beyond Memory)

2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2024

Put aside and ignored for too long, the history of the Atlantic slave trade has been lost in a dimension of oblivion denounced by the poets Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau.

Following the lead of pianist Alexandre Tharaud, Thierry Pécou also leaned his art towards the memory of this tragic and distressing history by designing a complete show, working with the multi-faceted artist Jean-François Boclé. In an atmosphere free from pathos, but turned towards our contemporary world, the one-hour piece relates to length of the time is takes to pass (passage) through the exhibition. The time for strolling is followed by that of the concert where the instrumental references and melodic lines insist on excess, tearing and erasure so well described by the two Martinican authors.

Sefarad's

2014, 2015, 2016, 2024

"I wanted to address this contrast by working on a musical source directly focused on the memory of a people. The result of this reflection developed around the descendants of the Jews of Spain, the Sefarad’s programme exploits the rhythm of Arabic songs, claiming the cross-inspiration of the repertoires".

Sephardic songs carry within them a nostalgia for exile, mixed with outbursts of joy against a background of religiosity. The voice (of soprano Gaëlle Méchaly, the instigator of this project), the flute, the clarinet, the double bass, the piano and percussions answer each other in a work with musicians arranged in the space and centered around the movements of the singer. "We wanted to free ourselves from the classic ritual of the concert by creating moments of interaction between the musicians to offer a total spectacle for the audience."

Walking in Beauty

(La Voie de la Beauté)

2016, 2017, 2018, 2019

Harmony, beauty, health... form a connected whole, which is at the heart of the life of the Navajo Indians of the southwestern United States. "Hózhó" is the term designated to this concept, which our lexicon is unable to translate into a single word or equivalent phrase.

From the repertoire developed for ceremonies intended to heal the members of the community, and through meetings with the great Navajo poet, Laura Tohe, Thierry Pécou was inspired by haunting and repetitive songs to create a work of imagination, by telling a little about these cultures in communion with nature. The first part, Femme changeante, cantate des Quatre Montagnes, (Changing Woman, cantata of the Four Mountains), and the second, the opera Nahasdzaan in the Glittering World, echo the wide open spaces where the Navajo people register their total understanding of ecological and social issues, in a tireless quest for balance.

Ohuaya

and the artistic and cultural initiatives

Starting in 2017

In balance with its surroundings, the Navajo community, established in the southwest of the United States, places great importance on the healing of an individual through ceremonies that involve the whole community.

Inspired by this rite, Thierry Pécou transposed the principle "like a metaphor" by re-interpreting it in the form of a range of cultural and community projects in Normandy, France. Museums, gardens, schools, private estates and more were the meeting places for conferences, poetry readings, equitherapy workshops... offering very powerful moments of connection around music. "We managed to reach new audiences who were able to experience very vivid emotional situations, when they would not have come to listen to the opera or music in more formal and conventional settings."

Sangata

2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025

Sangata is the story of a dialogue between six musicians with very different musical approaches and ways of working: three new generation Indian instrumentalists, Ragini Shankar (violin), Rishab Prasana (Bansuri flute), Aman Ali (tabla) and three members of Ensemble Variances; Thierry Pécou, alongside flautist Anne Cartel and clarinetist Carjez Gerretsen.

Driven by a spiritual approach, Thierry Pécou joined the Indians with musical material inspired by ragas, which he composed from previous encounters in India and his own research. Five days of residency allowed the artists to exchange ideas drawing on their mutual traditions: "the exchange was magnificent and very stimulating; Sangata is one of the projects that touched me the most for the musical and human encounter it represents."

Human non human

2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023

Hearing the song of whales in the wild is not easy; yet it is spreading a message that could remind us of our own condition: that of an endangered species.

Under the influence of composer François-Bernard Mâche, Thierry Pécou questioned the relationships that arise between the music of certain animal species and that of composers. Of "impressive spectral complexity", the song of the whales refers to the splendid expanses of the river Saint Laurent in Quebec, where the biological rhythm takes out the observer from his own construction of time. "My work questions our possibility of extinction through the presence of animal sound. I'm not trying to scare or be nostalgic; I only wish to bring awareness through the artistic object" (Thierry Pécou).

Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World

2019, 2021

Nahasdzáán, which means Mother Earth – the one who feeds us and the one we have to care for.

Nahasdzáán is a unique creation which evokes the four successive worlds of the Navajos – black, blue, yellow and white – which are in turn related to the four fundamental aspects of the human being: mind, body, spirit and social interaction. This work questions the social and environmental impacts that contemporary humanity inflicts on Nahasdzáán, the Mother Earth, which is in search of healing and balance. The opera, with a libretto by Navajo poet Laura Tohe, deals with burning ecological questions. “What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves; in caring for ourselves, we take care of the earth”, chant the Navajos at the final healing ceremony.

Bachc®ab

2020, 2022, 2025

Speak to sensitivity and the intellect, without harming either of them... In this endeavour, there is only one master: the cantor from Leipzig!

It was around the Crab Canon – a sort of musical palindrome – that the Bachc®ab project of the musicians of Variances was developed, in a dialogue with the early music ensemble Zefiro Torna. Built around Bach’s Musical Offering, the programme brings together ancient and modern in the same formation, tuned to the same pitch: "Bach's music forms a core, in the middle of very diverse pieces following the same palindrome process – works from the Middle Ages as well as a composition I made especially for this project" (Thierry Pecou). As happy as it is improbable, the mixture of instrumentation enabled the meeting of two universes with shared values.

Batouala

2021, 2023

The project stages and sets to music the expressive energy and poetic force of the novel Batouala by René Maran, winner of the 1921 Goncourt Prize.

A singular precursor of the negritude movement, René Maran is an author of universal scope whose themes relating to nature and the human condition are of burning relevance today. His work is punctuated by a profusion of images, situations and sensations that stimulate the imagination and make this abundant book ideal for theatrical and musical extension. Jean-Louis Sagot-Duvauroux, an essayist involved in Franco-African cooperation, has written the dramaturgy, allowing the powerful sobriety of Bibi Tanga's voice to shine through. The music takes on a central role, driving the unfolding of the story, creating a unique operatic form composed of narratives, sounds and images.

Le grand voyage

2022, 2023

This great musical and poetic journey brings together the present day and antiquity.

At the very heart of this programme, Thierry Pécou's string quartet with fixed sounds, Les rameurs obscurs de la barque de Rê, is an imaginary exploration of the many different aspects of Egypt and the city of Cairo: the composer drew his inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which describes the mysterious nocturnal voyage of the solar god Ra as he travels in his boat between life and death, towards a new cycle of life. In resonance, existential questions and reminiscences of ancient civilisations emerge from Philip Glass's String Quartet No. 2, inspired by Samuel Beckett's short story Company.

O Future

2024

A poetic, cosmopolitan epic, O Future  follows the initiatory path of a group of children, concerned about the future of the Earth and in search of meaning.

This Conference of Birds - a Persian poem that ranks among the great founding tales - from another millennium draws on the cultures and wisdom of ancient and forgotten peoples: the Aztecs, the Crees of North America, the Bushmen of South Africa and the Moai of Easter Island... A theme dear to the heart of composer Thierry Pécou, who wrote a new score for the occasion at the request of the Théâtre de Caen. The young singers give their voices to the libretto by Alice Kudlak, joined by Bernard Kudlak for the staging. Co-founder of the legendary Cirque Plume, Kudlak will bring the circus arts to the stage. For this new production at the Théâtre de Caen, La Maîtrise de Caen (Boys Chorus) will be joined by the San Francisco Girls Chorus.

Stalker

2024

Stalker  is a new kind of opera, tending to free itself from the traditional form of lyric theater in favor of a more fragmented form, a search for the occupation of space and time that places the spectator in a non-strictly frontal position, wandering about, and in an immersive sound flux. 

The opera's libretto borrows for the most part from the central part of Andrei Tarkovsky's screenplay, reduced and punctuated by ironically humorous philosophical inserts from the Strougatski brothers' book. An eminent scientist and a best-selling author pay a "stalker", a sort of mystical guide and great surveyor of the Zone, to guide them to the Chamber that anyone who enters it will have their most heartfelt wish granted.

Miroirs

2024

The theme of the mirror, with its deep and multiple symbolic charge, has not spared the imagination of musicians.

From the retrograde motets of Guillaume de Machaut to Bach's crab-like canons, from the rhetorical figures of serial twelve-tone music to the evocation of poetic images reflected in the music of Marc Patch, the mirror still resonates with today's composers. This programme draws together a series of works, perhaps leading us into the limbo of dreams and the unconscious...

Pulse

2023, 2025

A vital element if ever there was one, the pulse permeates this dreamlike programme, the result of a meeting between Thierry Pécou and his Ensemble Variances, and the Montreal ensemble Paramirabo.

The main work is Pulse, a recent, gentle and hypnotic score by Steve Reich. In homage to this great master of the repetitive music movement, Thierry Pécou has written Byar, a piece directly inspired by the gamelan, the Indonesian percussion orchestra. Echoing this, Missy Mazzoli and Cassandra Miller display rich harmonic worlds and lines that are sometimes jazzy, often meditative. This concert will also be an opportunity to bring together the composition classes of the École Normale de Musique de Paris, with the premiere of pieces written by the advanced students.