Dialogue slave

How can music and words tell the story of History? Through the encounter between the Sonate pour deux bassons by Sofia Goubaïdoulina and the testimonies gathered by Svetlana Alexievitch, this show weaves a narrative in which artistic creation and collective memory answer each other with rare intensity.

Two major figures of the Soviet sphere, the composer Sofia Goubaïdoulina and the writer Svetlana Alexievitch, meet in this show conceived and performed by the bassoonists Antoine Pecqueur and Amandine Rivière.

A musician and journalist, Antoine Pecqueur develops projects at the crossroads of music and social issues. Amandine Rivière, a bassoonist committed to creation and teaching, shares with him a taste for contemporary repertoires and for forms that bring music into dialogue with other disciplines. Together, they have devised a show in which the bassoon becomes in turn voice, sound material and instrument of memory.

Through the Sonate pour deux bassons by Goubaïdoulina, composed in 1977, and extracts from Alexievitch's La guerre n'a pas un visage de femme, published in 1985, music and literature enter into dialogue. Goubaïdoulina conveys, through sound material, the tensions and upheavals of her time; Alexievitch, for her part, gathers the voices of women who lived through the war, giving a place to those whom History has too often left in the shadows.

The show thus weaves a plural narrative around women, war and memory, in which words extend the sounds and music becomes another space for testimony. By bringing musical creation and documentary speech into dialogue, "Dialogue slave" invites us to listen differently to the traces left by Soviet history and to gauge their resonance in our present.

Coordination: Antoine Pecqueur