Sonnets for counter-tenor and orchestra

“Having worked on the Cantos of Ezra Pound in Double Jeu for coloratura soprano and orchestra,” writes Marc-André Dalbavie, “I wanted a change of air. Although Louise Labé’s sonnets are metrically very strict, they actually suit my need for freedom in composition. Their richness opens a vast field of possibilities for me, unlike free verse which is almost sufficient in itself and requires music to follow it.”

As early as 2000 a voice from another age caught Dalbavie’s attention. In his Sextine Cyclus he wrote a piece for soprano and orchestra which could be sung by a counter-tenor, mixing the implications of a title evoking a poetic form of the Renaissance (a form notably exploited by Monteverdi in his Sixth Book of Madrigals) with those of a text from the middle ages. Several years later in a concert of Italian music by the Ensemble La Fenice he met a new inspiration in the counter-tenor of Philippe Jaroussky: “an extremely pure voice,” Dalbavie observed, “almost crystalline, powerful and fragile at the same time, and so ambiguous in colour.”     

The counter-tenor voice takes us inevitably to the world of opera seria, with its castrato singers, and is scarcely expected in contemporary music. However, as well as being adaptable to an old repertoire it is suitable for a new one which would take into full account the special qualities of the voice and its marvellous possibilities. One thinks for example of the three masculine sisters of Peter Eötvös in his opera based on the Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Contemporary composers, Philippe Jaroussky has observed, “turn to the counter-tenor voice not only for its relevance to the past but also for the very special range of vocal colour it allows. And quite rightly since, after all, it is a voice created in our time! We are valuable in baroque music and why should we be any less so in contemporary music too?”

In writing this work for Philippe Jaroussky, Marc-André Dalbavie chose six poems by the Lyons poet Louise Labé (1525–1566) in the intention of profiting from the unity of form and of meaning in her sonnets and creating a true song cycle with orchestra. That unity rests in the way the poems, like troubadour songs, “say much the same thing but say it differently, with the result that the manner in which things are said is more important than the things themselves.” Certainly, the choice of the sonnet form recalls Boulez’s experiments with Mallarmé. But Dalbavie insists on preserving the intelligibility of the text, avoiding emphasis on the most important words but making a priority of the fluidity of the vocal line and the balance peculiar to the sonnet in the strange irregularity arising from the    last six lines. Remaining in the background, so as not to participate in the dialogue, the orchestra sounds in sympathy with the voice – in a way not unlike the lively landscapes that the painter Piero della Francesca placed in the background of his portraits and certain details of which were often intimately linked to the person represented.

The Sonnets were commissioned by the Orchestre National de Lyon and first performed in Lyon in 2008 by Philippe Jaroussky and the Orchestre National de Lyon under the direction of Thierry Fischer.       

translated and adapted from a programme note by François-Gildas Tual