On Île-aux-Moines, a master stroke to kick off the Escales musicales festival

On Île-aux-Moines, a master stroke to kick off the Escales musicales festival

21 July 2024

For its first show of the season, the Escales musicales association pulled out all the stops on Friday 19 July in the church of Saint-Michel on Île-aux-Moines. The string sextet Des Équilibres took over the choir of the church, taking the large audience on a journey through musical landscapes ranging from dark and tormented to peaceful. ‘Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night opened this extraordinary concert. Resolutely contemporary, the cellos responded to each other in low, dark tones, then the piece relaxed and moved towards more classical notes thanks to the two violins and two violas. ‘It was surprising but interesting,’ said one audience member. The work by Alexandre Zemilinsky, a forgotten post-romantic composer, was more sentimental. Finally, Graziane Finzi’s ‘Le pays d’avant naître’, with its rapid movements punctuated by pizzicati (plucked strings), took the audience into a more energetic piece. ‘You have to see it to believe it’, said one audience member, still overwhelmed by the sextet’s performance.