Toulouse Explores the Corridors of Time

Le Point, September 25, 2024
Toulouse Explores the Corridors of Time
Review by Olivier Bellamy

At the 45th Piano aux Jacobins festival, American pianist Pedja Mužijević offers us his playlist and takes us on a journey back to the future. 

In Toulouse, life is good. To ease the weight of the back-to-school season and give us the illusion that summer isn’t quite over, the Piano aux Jacobins festival takes place in September. For forty-five years, Catherine d'Argoubet and Paul-Arnaud Péjouan have brought pianists—sometimes from very far away—whom you don’t hear elsewhere and who are their personal favorites. Some artists may try all sorts of ways to get invited, but to no avail. Yes, life is good, but one is first and foremost the master of their own house. Indeed!

The concerts take place at the Couvent des Jacobins, a jewel of medieval art that houses the relics of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The piano is set up in the chapter house, where the Dominican friars handled earthly matters, and the audience indulges in celestial pleasure, even in the cloister's ambulatory.

It’s not the best acoustics in the world, but the setting is incredibly inspiring. And some artists are better than others at turning a handicap into an advantage. They invoke the spirit of the place and tame the mysterious arcana of sound the way some actors instantly know how to capture the light. This is the case with American pianist Pedja Muzijevic.

A sharp, fresh sound that gets straight to the point
Little known in France, he is the artistic administrator of the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York and artistic advisor to the Tippet Rise Art Center, a Fitzcarraldian utopia in the heart of Montana, where twelve concert Steinways (including Horowitz’s last piano) sing alongside the voices of nature.

This joyful intellectual has toured with Baryshnikov, collaborated with Trisha Brown (a postmodern dance icon), and loves projects with filmmakers, painters, or starred chefs.
His sound is sharp, fresh, and goes straight to the point. It’s not harsh, nor lacking in depth, with that certain something cordial and positive, typically American, that doesn’t get lost in the corridors of the past. It coexists harmoniously with the ghosts of the present without stirring up their internal conflicts or stomach aches.

His program is both modern and vintage. Modern because it blends various pieces without distinction of time or style, ranging from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to Ligeti, from Haydn to Silvestrov, and from Ravel to Spears or Crumb. There’s nothing intellectual in this collage, as everything follows an intimate logic and forms a wonderfully natural whole.

Vintage because the pianist pays homage to the “mixtape,” that craze that delighted us in the last century when, for the first time in recorded music history, thanks to the invention of the minicassette, we could compose our own compilations as we pleased.

“There’s no rational explanation for it, just as there isn’t for the recipe for moules-frites,” the pianist tells us with humor, in perfectly decent French, which we appreciate. We had forgotten that little joy of adolescence: mixing a piece of Chopin, a Piaf song, or a Beatles track to share this collection with our friends, in the car or at the beach. Pedja Muzijevic brings this joy back into fashion.
Old pieces and recent works

Hearing Ravel’s Oiseaux tristes between Antheil and Spears makes it both familiar and different. It doesn’t sound like it does in Miroirs and, in this unprecedented juxtaposition, it finds a new freshness and a particular color. Like a poem learned in school and rediscovered in a stack of newspapers.

Further on, Pedja Muzijevic indulges in the fantasy of slicing Haydn’s Sonata No. 62 in E-flat Major and slipping in Crumb and Cowell between the movements, like interspersing a slice of tomato and a pickle between the bread and ham. It’s both bold and “historically informed,” as it wasn’t uncommon in the past to interrupt new works to vary the pleasures.

Mixing old pieces with recent works is like placing a computer on a Louis XV table. If the combination works, one is rejuvenated, and the other ennobled. In fact, Pedja Muzijevic doesn’t play Haydn like Alfred Brendel or Andreas Staier. He’s more in the vein of Friedrich Gulda, who claimed that our ears aren’t from the 18th century.

What interests him is the modern Haydn, the experimenter, and timeless inventor. As a result, Crumb becomes his cousin, in one of those plot twists that joyfully conclude classic comedies.

As for the harp effects imagined by Cowell and executed by the pianist with his hand rummaging in the piano’s belly, they remind us that past arpeggios sought a similar effect. We’re curious to hear if the emotion of the slow movement holds up in this iconoclastic perspective. Oh yes.

Behind the anachronistic play, the grandeur remains, the universal genius of the composer transcending the style of his time, his flowery rhetoric, and his good manners. Amidst the graffiti, the Mona Lisa keeps her mystery.

Enchanted audience
In short, Pedja Muzijevic has concocted a demanding yet accessible program, respectful of the place and open to today’s world. It piques the curiosity of seasoned music lovers (without frightening them) and young ears (without alienating them). The experience succeeds because he takes the audience along on his adventure.

It reminded me of a performance by Patti Smith called Correspondances. With great ease, the Greenwich Village icon, the Martha Argerich of rock, speaks about her passion for Pasolini’s poetry, Maria Callas’s voice, and Jean Genet’s writing. She recites her own poems and sings in her distinctive voice, against a backdrop of religious paintings and landscapes.

It’s so out of the box and personal that the audience is captivated. I didn’t understand everything, but it remains one of the most fascinating stage experiences of my life. Similarly, I don’t know what connects Crumb to Haydn, but the gentle persuasion of the pianist in this place of intense faith and preserved beauty has the strength of a meeting that’s far from trivial.

Source: Le Point, September 2024