Making people smile, laugh, through music, without overplaying parody or the use of comic song texts, such is the success of two shows presented in Paris at the same time. Duration of about seventy-five minutes, which leaves just enough frustration. In common, a mixture of classical music, jazz, variety song, pop. And, luckily, on different days. The Belgian duo La Framboise frivole is at La Scala, Tuesday and Wednesday, and the quintet Les Bons Becs at the Alhambra, from Thursday to Sunday.
The title given by cellist Peter Hens and pianist Bart Van Caenegem to their show, This is not a frivolous Raspberry, a nod to the pipe of their compatriot, the painter René Magritte, indicates where the duo is headed. A surrealist game of a hundred references by correspondence of airs, instrumental quotations or songs, starting from paintings. An absurd story makes the connection. It’s about Schubert’s Lieder “posthumous, written after his death”, of spies, Camembert from Normandy, from Mollessorgsk, forgotten sister of the Russian composer Moussorgski… A whirlwind in which one loses oneself with delight. As in the musical one of seemingly impossible harmonic passages, of melodic fragments that bounce off others, of connections between song phrases, an abundance of finds for virtuoso interpretation.
One of the sequences, The Scream of Munch”, will serve as an example. The romantic Ballad for Adeline, by Richard Clayderman, The Ad; further, the ” I screamed “ d’Aline, of Christopher, and break the voice, by Patrick Bruel, respond to it; the Go, thought, of the choir of slaves of Nabucco, of Verdi makes its appearance, as The International – who will return in another sequence –, and James Brown, king of the soul and funk cry, joins all this pretty world.
musical comedy
With Big Bang, Les Bons Becs, around thirty compositions have been transcribed, for the four clarinettists, Florent Héau, Eric Baret, Yves Jeanne and Laurent Bienvenu, and the drummer and percussionist Bruno Desmouillières. None was originally written for this alliance of instruments from the clarinet family (from the small to the bass), and the quality and inventiveness of the arrangements are to be commended. The singer and director Caroline Loeb designed the visual part. She makes the musicians twirl, jump, go everywhere on the stage of the Alhambra while playing. Which, for blowers, is not the simplest. Their sirtaki that picks up speed on Zorba Dance, by Mikis Theodorakis, is an achievement.
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