Pierre Chastellain chante Ellenberger & Thuillard

Pierre Chastellain chante Ellenberger & Thuillard

Alfred THUILLARD / Pierre ELLENBERGER: Affût – Dans ce voyage immobile – Le temps d’hiver – La forêt soumise – Amis – Vous qui… – Les enfants du mal de vivre – Mélancolie – Nénuphar – Voilure basse – Je n’ai pas de village.

Pierre Chastellain

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Chastellain_(chanteur)

Song — Pierre Chastellain: no objection whatsoever…

Learning that Pierre Chastellain sings music by creators other than himself may come as a surprise; listening to such a performance, however, raises no objection whatsoever, for this marriage of professional mastery and personal sensitivity promises to be a success!

One may argue here that, in interpreting Ellenberger and Thuillard, Chastellain is making, compared with song pure and simple, a kind of “chamber song,” just as there is, in the classical world, “chamber music,” a privileged moment of synthesis in artistic creation.

And yet, how many pitfalls at the outset, with Pierre Ellenberger’s verses — almost too finely struck — and with these pieces so often having to serve octosyllabic poetry, a conjunction that frequently leads to a certain monotony. Alfred Thuillard has just about avoided the trap; Jacques Walmond, promoted to arranger, makes one forget it.

What remains is the astonishing Pierre Chastellain, who lays all this out like a born reciter, blending, with nuance, those somewhat antagonistic virtues: precision and sensitivity.

Radio TV Je vois tout, 1980

We waited two years for it! Would it come out or not? Seldom has a local performer’s recording been so eagerly awaited. Obviously, people may think what they like, but Pierre Chastellain is someone who, today, has earned the right to keep us waiting. And when you discover what lies inside this album — composed entirely of poems by Pierre Ellenberger set to music by Alfred Thuillard — you understand why Chastellain didn’t want to release it until he had achieved exactly what he desired — what must be called perfection.

An unfair prejudice holds that poetry enjoys a higher cultural status than song. Yet song is not opposed to poetry. And “popular” does not necessarily mean “commercial.” Ellenberger–Thuillard–Chastellain: what they offer together has little to do with the usual politico-social song. In their work there are neither lyrical set pieces on the time of revolt nor edifying descriptions of the future world. They do not attack; they describe. Their songs are testimonies, observations — almost dry and yet moving. And the discretion they display heightens the effectiveness of what they offer:

“You who drink blithely
From the fountains of power,
So long as the weight of an evening’s promises
Grows lighter under the wind,

You will not make it to winter
Without having forgotten your brothers.
The time that lies ahead for you
Will turn you into kites
That can no longer return.”

Words set down on the page await coloration. Sometimes it takes almost nothing: an inflection of the voice, an inclination of the body, a simple wink, to breathe into them strength, anger, tenderness, love, truth — to send them soaring high into the sky or make them fall back suddenly to ground level. And if the superb texts in this album have a beauty and richness of writing that generally offer themselves to the selfish pleasure of the eye, it soon becomes clear that Ellenberger’s poems are inseparable from the voice that sings them and the music that inhabits them.

If they did not spring from his pen, Chastellain makes them his own; he “writes” them, he sees them, he lives them. The nuance matters. A cry of revolt and of love in its purest state, only this voice — wonderfully unsettling, like life itself — could give these words their full weight and deepest meaning. The courage of simple words is doubtless more meritorious than that of scandalous words. And this courage, Chastellain expresses through a broad, vibrant interpretation in which the breath flows well, where bite yields to a fiery determination, to a cool bareness. With him, no trace of that demagogy that plays on easy feeling, gratuitous and soon becoming mawkish. Nothing but the voice, present at every moment, behind each note, behind each breath.

The music, finally, unfolds like a narrative, each track like a chapter — dreamlike, image-laden music made from the arrangement of a multitude of small cells. In this collection there is a shaping thought, a kind of concept album articulated, like the soundtrack of an imaginary film, into distinct sequences of ambience and texture, within a perfectly coherent statement, a strong unity. And all of it on sumptuous, varied arrangements (written by Jacques Walmond), homogeneous and prodigiously inventive, which — far from limiting the singer’s voice — carry it to the summit of his art.

Gérard Montani