Festival Messiaen 2025 - 1, 2, 3 Heisser ! Concert 1

1, 2, 3 concerts by Jean-François Heisser! On one, two and three pianos, the pianist, conductor, artistic director and teacher celebrates the jubilee of his fifty-year career in three exceptional concerts at the Festival Messiaen au Pays de la Meije.

For this first solo concert, he shares the stage in Poèmes pour Mi, the first of Messiaen's great cycles for voice and piano, composed at Petichet in Isère. The work forms a diptych with the Chants de Terre et de Ciel, both of which sing of married love with his first wife Claire Delbos - the composer affectionately nicknamed her 'Mi'. The poems are in Messiaen's own hand, inspired by the poetry of Pierre Reverdy, and also contain passages borrowed "from Saint Paul, the Gospel, the Psalms and images taken from the landscape that surrounded me at the time: that of the Alps, the mountains, the lakes and the Dauphiné countryside".
Berio's Sequenza 4, an exploration of the instrument's history and virtuosity, develops a highly percussive touch with references to Chopin, Bartok's work and jazz. Berio also creates resonance effects and harmonic halos from which chords, arpeggios and very fast notes emerge. Premiered in Berlin in 2021 by its commissioner Daniel Barenboim, Philippe Manoury's Das Wohlpräparierte Klavier brings the piano into dialogue with electronics and evokes Bach through its title and structure, divided into two main sections: a free-spirited fantasy and a rigorous, severe form.

Jean-François Heisser, piano
Jenny Daviet, soprano