Double concert “Brad Mehldau / Roberto Negro & Émile Parisien”

On the occasion of the Voiron Jazz Festival, find a double set with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and the duo of Roberto Negro and Emile Parisien.

Brad Mehldau:

Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has been performing since the early 1990s with his trio and as a recitalist. His musical personality forms a dichotomy between, on the one hand, the improviser who knows how to guarantee the effect of surprise and wonder that arise from spontaneous musical expression in real time; and on the other, an artist fascinated by the formal construction of music. The structuring of his musical thought is then at the service of expression. These two aspects of Brad Mehldau's personality mingle and oppose each other, causing an effect approaching organized chaos. Alongside his trio and solo activities, Brad Mehldau works with many jazz musicians such as Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden, Lee Konitz, Michael Brecker, Wayne Shorter, John Scofield and Charles Lloyd.
For more than ten years, he has collaborated with personalities he has always admired: guitarists Peter Bernstein and Kurt Rosenwinkel, saxophonist Mark Turner...
Outside the sphere of jazz, Brad Mehldau has made various recordings (Teatro by Willie Nelson, Scar by singer and composer Joe Henry). We have been able to hear his music in the cinema (Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, The Million Dollar Hotel by Wim Wender).
He also composed the soundtrack for the French film My wife is an actress (Yvan Attal, 2001). Carnegie Hall in New York has also commissioned several works for piano and voice from him: The Blue Estuaries, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; recorded with soprano Renée Fleming, these pieces form the album Love Sublime in 2006, while appeared the same year by Nonesuch House on Hill, a disc including his jazz compositions for trio.
In 2008, Carnegie Hall commissioned a cycle of seven love songs for the Swedish mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, created in 2010. Love Songs (Naïve, 2010), double album dedicated to this cycle combined with a selection of songs French, American, English and Swedish, has been widely acclaimed by critics. In 2013, Brad Mehldau created Variations on a Melancholy Theme, a large-scale orchestral piece which he performed alongside the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia. During the 2009-2010 then 2010-2011 seasons at London's Wigmore Hall, Brad Mehldau organized jazz concert cycles. During the same period, he was artist-in-residence at Wigmore Hall and holder of the Richard and Barbara Deb's Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall, becoming the first jazz artist to hold this position since its inception in 1995 – among his predecessors are Louis Andriessen, Elliott Carter and John Adams.

Text reproduced with the kind authorization of La Cité de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris".

Roberto Negro / Emile Parisian:

“Ligeti? I adore ! Me too, I love ! Thus were born Les Métamorphoses, the adaptation of Gyorgy Ligeti's Nocturnal Metamorphoses by Emile Parisien and Roberto Negro, as generous and thunderstruck as it is full of reverence for the great Hungarian master. It is both a reduction and a re-writing for saxophone and piano of the famous string quartet written by Ligeti between 1953 and 1954, his first quartet.
Emile Parisien and Roberto Negro rewrite, adapt and rearrange Ligeti's music, walking in, alongside, beyond and between the lines of the original. They open the doors of improvisation to him while respecting the character of the themes, deep and playful. A writing inhabited by rhythm; sometimes quiet engine, sometimes devil under caffeine. The rhythmic intensity, the physical commitment, almost cathartic inhabits the interpretation of this duet,