Gabriel Yared in the spotlight at Radio France: 40 years of film music

Few of the French film music composers have been awarded an Oscar. Gabriel Yared is part of this very small circle, which also includes Maurice Jarre, Michel Legrand , George Delerue, Ludovic Bource and Alexandre Desplat . The audience-less concert offered by Radio France, with Gabriel Yared at the piano and the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Dirk Brossé, offers listeners a glimpse of the French composer ‘s broad musical palette.

The contemplative and romantic scores, tinged with a deep melancholy, hold the high part of the program. The music of Camille Claudel (film directed by Bruno Nuytten in 1988) strongly influenced the own admission of Gabriel Yared by the Tenth Symphony of Mahler and Transfigured Night by Schoenberg , leads the listener into a heightened lyricism, which tormented the treble violins interact with the dark bass of cellos. In the soundtrack of The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996), it is the comforting brass that comes to support the passionate strings, all guided by a melancholy bassoon.

The performed excerpts also reveal the influence of jazz in the work of Gabriel Yared. This is particularly true of the score of 37 ° 2 in the morning  (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986), where Lewis Morison’s saxophone, with its intense and sensual sound, plunges into a jazzy atmosphere, which would perfectly suit the images of a sunrise over Manhattan. The sounds are also felt, although in a more discreet way, in the soundtrack of L’Amant , a delicate page relating the birth of the amorous passion, from which emerge, in the middle of a delicate harp and cottony layers of violins , some jazzy piano notes.

A great lover of classical music, Gabriel Yared does not hesitate to pay tribute to his masters in his works. This is the case in The English Patient , for which he composed an elegant prelude in the style of Bach , or even in the score of the ballet Raven Girl , choreographed in 2013 by Wayne McGregor , a light refrain in which the influence is felt. by Mozart , played here with malice by the pianist Suzana Bartal, offering a nice moment of complicity with the orchestra.

A composer without borders, Gabriel Yared ventures into Argentinian music with La Lune dans le gutter (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983). Here he performs a tango for large orchestra, where Juanjo Mosalini’s mysterious and lascivious bandoneon dialogues with a solo violin, performed with passion by Nathan Mierdl, with almost Gypsy accents.

The concert is also an opportunity to discover new pages. Like this excerpt from the soundtrack of Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), a big budget Hollywood peplum, for which the composer’s music was ultimately not chosen. A surprising decision when listening to this excerpt, supposed to accompany the bag of the city of Troy, martial page in which the brass warriors sound the attack, supported by thunderous percussions. A page at the antipodes of another unpublished piece, Adagio for an unreleased film , a serious and majestic passacaglia inspired by Bach .

For her two interventions, the young soprano Héloïse Poulet, spotted a few years ago by the composer, delivers a successful performance, without suffering from the comparison with the two singular voices that preceded her on the screen. In “Lullaby for Cain”, lugubrious and melancholy lullaby initially sung by Sinéad O’Connor for the film The Talented Mr. Ripley(Anthony Minghella, 1999), the crystalline and delicate voice of the soprano subtly alternates moments of great sweetness and fury. It begins with an almost imperceptible thread of voice, on the edge, picking up the high notes with a touching fragility. But very quickly the instruments were carried away, and the voice was overwhelmed by the orchestra, only succeeding in extricating itself from it fully during the apotheosis of the piece, the pronunciation of Cain’s name, in a heart-rending cry.

Héloïse Poulet makes the stylistic splits for her second stint on stage, where she performs “La Complainte de la vieux salope”, a humorous song interpreted by Catherine Ringer in Tatie Danielle (Étienne Chatiliez, 1990), a large demonstrative number which is more similar from the world of opera. The soprano delivers a performance that is certainly less bombastic than the singer of Rita Mitsouko, who played the diva to their heart’s content on this piece, but this allows the interpretation to gain in elegance and vocal power. Héloïse Poulet shows great dramatic expressiveness and a beautiful length of breath, proudly showing off her piercing highs and her laughing vibrato, offering splendid vocalizations.

So many musical pages that allow us to grasp the universe of Gabriel Yared, carried here by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France , under the precise and passionate direction of Dirk Brossé, whose musicians prove once again that they are capable of anything play, recalling the many bridges between classical music and film music