piano and orchestra

Premiere: January 15, 2013, Alain Lefèvre, piano; Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM); Ludovic Morlot, conductor • Concert, Maison symphonique de Montréal, Montréal (Québec)

This concerto, is a tribute to author and avant-garde Québec poet Claude Gauvreau (1925-1971), depicts the bridge between his visionary poetic world (represented by the piano) and the obscurantist society of the time (the orchestra). In face of this lack of understanding and possibly, according to the poet, the failure of all means of real communication, Gauvreau developed a “sound poetry”, a kind of onomatopoeic language he described as exploréen (explorean).

The titles of the first (Les oranges sont vertes) and third movements (La charge de l’orignal épormyable) refer to the works Gauvreau wrote for the stage, while the second movement (Saint-Jean-de-Dieu) induces memories of the asylum for the mentally disturbed in Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, where Gauvreau was committed on numerous occasions and now a psychiatric hospital in Montreal re-named Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine.

[iv-15]