Voici le nouveau jardin
Concert with multimedia
Music: Thierry Pécou; video: Jingfei Li
Inspired by the texts of Lao Zi, François Cheng and François Jullien on Chinese wisdom, this concert-video presents a convergence of two cultures and offers a beautiful homage to ancient China through multiple artistic expressions: music, text, video multimedia, electronic sound and musician's gestures.
During Ensemble Variances' China tour in May 2010 presenting the world premier of Garden of the Sage, this important piece attracted about 4000 spectators in renowned concert venues such as Nanjing Arts Institut, Shanghai Concert Hall, Concert Hall de City Hall of Hong Kong (Festival French May) and Xiamen et Shenzhen Concert Halls.
Garden of the Sage is an encounter between modern classical music, live electronics and one Chinese instrument – guqin, for which Thierry Pecou has composed specially. Without direct allusions to Chinese traditional music, his music tries to reveal a particular impermanency which is made of floatings and wanderers inside of the audio's materials.
Created by a young gifted Chinese artist, the video occupies not only the central place of the scenery but also extends the musical intention and establishes a reel dialog with the musical gesture to become a supplementary voice.
After its China tour Garden of the sage, work in progress, will be created in Reims in a new version for soprano, piano, guqin and electronics.
The cast
4 musicians and 1 multimedia artist
Hadhoum Tunc soprano
Thierry Pécou piano
Li-Yu You guqin
Max Bruckert (Grame Lyon) sound engineer (electronic sounds)
Li Jing Fei multimedia artist