Violin Concerto - Benoît Mernier - Text of presentation
The commissioning of this violin concerto by the Belgian National Orchestra gave me a stimulation and a happiness that I was not fully aware of when this project began to take shape.
The creation of this work is part of a series of commissions commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Great War. From the outset, I had expressed the desire to write a violin concerto that would necessarily be longer in duration than most of the other commissions given and created by the ONB for this occasion. Despite the format of the work and the presence of a soloist, this project was enthusiastically and unconditionally welcomed by the orchestra's management. The only thing left to do was to find a soloist and something to feed the commemorative theme...
As I am not a violinist myself, I wanted to be able to work regularly with the soloist who would be chosen at the beginning of the composition and to maintain an exchange with him that would stimulate my musical imagination but also allow me to test things, make them evolve and correct them as the work developed. Lorenzo Gatto's personality seemed to us an obvious choice to get involved in this project, especially as this magnificent musician showed a desire to invest himself in the field of creation, which is not always the case with great career soloists. So the first source of happiness and stimulation was the possibility of sharing in a 'work in progress'.
In my preparatory work, I was very quickly touched by two paradoxical ideas that emanated from photos of soldiers at the front or devastated landscapes, from poetic texts by authors who were themselves enlisted or witnesses to this tragedy (Cendrars, Péguy, Zweig, Apollinaire, etc.) but also from stories or novels by contemporary authors such as Laurent Gaudé.
The first is the metaphor of the atrocities committed through the images of a battered, gutted, unrecognizable land. The other is the beauty of a sometimes exacerbated, sometimes hopeful humanity found in the moving letters of soldiers to their loved ones and in love poems such as Guillaume Apollinaire's "Letters to Lou". This contrast gave rise to two movements of equal length, each fifteen minutes long, named after two poems by Guillaume Apollinaire from 'Lueur des tirs'.
The first movement, entitled "Hear the vehement earth..." attempts to convey this telluric and threatening expression coupled with the idea of crushing, of solitude in the face of peril and horror, but also of courage and bravery. In this respect, the sometimes fragile, sometimes virtuoso expression of a solo violin against the crushing masses of an orchestra could in many ways symbolise these elements.
The second movement, 'Exiled Grace', begins with a melody played by the violin alone, expressing both the nostalgia of a bygone world and that of a lost happiness. This movement evolves in climates that can also pass through lightness, tenderness and vivacity as can be the memories of happy times.
The two main ideas found in the two movements sometimes intersect and also intermingle within the same movement, to conclude in a climate of serenity and light.
Benoît Mernier, January 2015
Extraits des textes utilisés pour les deux mouvements
Désir
« (…) Entends la terre véhémente
Vois les lueurs avant d’entendre les coups (…)
Nuit violente et violette et sombre et pleine d’or par moments
Nuit des hommes seulement (…)
Nuit violente ô nuit dont l’épouvantable cri profond devenait plus intense de minute en minute
Nuit qui criait comme une femme qui accouche
Nuit des hommes seulement »
La grâce exilée
« Va-t’en va-t’en mon arc-en-ciel
Allez-vous-en couleurs charmantes
Cet exil t’est essentiel
Infante aux écharpes changeantes
Et l’arc-en-ciel est exilé
Puisqu’on exile qui l’irise
Mais un drapeau s’est envolé
Prendre ta place au vent de bise »
Guillaume Apollinaire, Lueurs des tirs