Notebooks
Jean-Pierre Arnaud Oboe
Anne Ricquebourg Harp
Philippe Mercier Artistic collaboration
Paroles de poilus
Harp and oboe reunited for an intimate concert around the epistolary and musical writings of the Great War.
August 1, 1914: general mobilization. The churches sound the tocsin: the war mows down the men in the middle of the harvest. The letters will be the only link between the combatants and their relatives.
The writing of lives turned upside down by these four years is mixed with musical writing. The selected reading of excerpts from correspondence and war diaries, accompanied by the oboe and the harp, brings to life before our eyes the enthusiasm of the first months, the glances of the father and the lover who became a soldier, the words of children facing separation, life in the trenches, the hell of the front, the testamentary
letters, but also the vision of the nature which takes back its rights as well as the hope, the solidarity and the fraternity which unites the men.
The music of French and German composers of the time – Ravel, Satie, Caplet, Roussel, Debussy, Hindemith – accompanies the stories and at the same time testifies to the vital force of an art that never admits defeat.
Production TM+
Crédits photographiques Christophe Taamourte