All the mornings of the world

Tous les matins du monde represents the founding shock of my childhood, but also of my life as a musician. I discovered the film’s soundtrack when I was four years old – and when I was seven years old the latter, which still includes some quite impressive scenes for little ones !

But from this first contact with music alone, everything was decided. I obviously owe it to my father, a guitarist, and my mother, a passionate music lover, for making me hear it, however there was no educational speech from them. The encounter was purely sensitive, with the timbre of the viola da gamba, which I immediately asked to learn. I had already heard the instrument on record, used for basso continuo. Never his voice alone, whose colors and inflections fascinated me much more than the orchestral tracks of the record, which one could imagine easier to access.

Over the years, I obviously immersed myself in the narration of Alain Corneau’s film, then immersed myself in Pascal Quignard’s novel. I measured, by comparing the interpretation of Jordi Savall in the soundtrack and that of the same works during his concerts, how much he had put himself with the former in the shoes of the characters of Sainte-Colombe and Marin Marais, infusing each accent of their psychology, even if it means assuming an antihistorical approach that he obviously did not retain by playing the spare parts of this context. The desire to also abstract myself from the musicological constraints that my teachers imposed on me, most often rightly, and to also indulge in this theatrical exercise with my own intuitions and my own sensitivity then became irresistible.

Plusieurs paris, règles et postulats m’ont guidé dans ce jeu pascalien qu’est une reconstruction à notre usage de Tous les matins du monde.
Le premier sera de donner toute la musique du film, dans l’ordre où le public la découvre en voyant celui-ci. Ce qui exclut évidemment de s’en tenir à une ou deux violes, et pose la question des effectifs pour les pièces vocales et orchestrales ! D’où la présence des deux chanteuses pour la Troisième Leçon de Ténèbres de Couperin, et le consort qui nous permet de produire une réduction efficace des extraits du Bourgeois Gentilhomme de Lully. Je remercie d’ailleurs les musiciens fidèles de la Chapelle Harmonique d’accepter de prendre part à cette aventure pour des interventions parfois très courtes ! Car ces contrastes sont indispensables au recueillement, à l’introspection de Sainte-Colombe dans Le Retour ou Les Regrets.

VALENTIN TOURNET
Paris, March 2024

La Chapelle Harmonique


Valentin Tournet, viola da gamba & conductor