“Excuse me, is everyone here?” » Murmurs in the audience… Everyone glances at their neighbour, surprises themselves for a fraction of a second to check their own presence and pulls their necks towards the edge of the plateau where two men have just taken their place. One has inadvertently sat on the microphone and the second tries to hide his nervousness under a flood of words. Mathis and Raphaël know each other well. In their youth, they formed with Swan a trio united by their common passion for the piano. The years passed, Raphaël opened his music school and Mathis became a legend. As for Swan…
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Here he suddenly arrives, going back in time thanks to a pause in the pseudo-conference. “I was born at 5 years old”, he summarizes remembering his child’s hands for the first time on the keys of an immense vessel, this blindingly white Steinway. At the age of 10, his meeting with Mathis gave him a “second birth”. Raphaël will complete the band and they will leave together to study with Heinzberg, a great master in the twilight of his life.
Three virtuosos, including a genius
For writing SentinelsJean-François Sivadier was inspired by Castaway by Thomas Bernhard, who recounts the friendship between three piano virtuosos, including a genius: Glenn Gould in Bernhard’s novel, which became Mathis in Sivadier’s play. “We play the piano. Mathis is doing something else. Raphael said looking at Swan. Under the alert pen of Sivadier, sharpened to the test of the set, an exciting triangle takes shape. In just over two hours of extraordinary intensity, it condenses several years of decisive companionship.
This story with an incredible romantic breath grabs the public without artifice or intermediary, not even that of the piano object, yet at the heart of the subject. On the bare stage, with the exception of a canvas, three chairs and a folding table, only the infinite power of the verb acts and its radical incarnation by the dazzling Vincent Guédon (Mathis), Julien Romelard (Raphaël) and Samy Zerrouki ( Swan).
Alone in front of his instrument, each character finds in the friendship of the two others an apparently indestructible refuge. Will he survive the revelation of genius? Also hovers the shadow of Sarah Stensen, renowned concert performer, Swan’s mentor, and mother of Mathis who might not bear to see in her son the one who was going to eclipse her. Connected by this tutelary figure, the two young people seem to be the two poles of the same force of abstraction, music. The first seeks beauty, transcendence and communion with the public, while the second leads an inflexible quest towards the abyss of an uncompromising art, wary of “desire to please. This diabolical desire, which makes us beggars”.
Tender clashes
Between the two, Raphaël dreams of a political and unifying music, and leads the public in its doubts as a performer. The whole room vibrates with him in the throes where the precipitates, by refusing to him, a score of Shostakovich. We come to love these three endearing friends, never getting tired of their confrontations full of tenderness. “I’m yelling at you because I love you”, Mathis said to Swan, before making him fume with a final provocation: “Mozart died too late! » Their tasty jousts, where one swears only by the composer of Themagic flute and the other by the scandalous Stravinsky or the dark Berg, avoid the pitfall of insider debate. They open up captivating fields of reflection where essential questions around the theater and more broadly the place of each person in this world are outlined.
The sensitive echoes of this saga are diffracted over a piece composed in crescendo until the climax of the Tchaikovsky competition, which will seal the fate of their friendship. What energy, what breath! Until the last minutes of the show, of a sublime and unreal grace, we are bewitched by this stunning staging, a fascinating ballet where the actors literally show the music, the body as their only instrument. Images which, as soon as they evaporate, already leave us nostalgic for their raw and implacable beauty.
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Jean-François Sivadier: “Making the piano disappear, Glenn Gould’s dream”
“The idea of not having a piano on stage was imposed very quickly. Firstly because the actors are not pianists, and then because that would have constituted a pleonasm with regard to the text. The theater must leave plenty of room for the imagination, so you don’t have to show everything. And then, what do we watch when we attend a concert? Not the piano! We look at the body, the face… Through intimate work, each actor was able to find the dance of his character to show the music, and we benefited from the gaze of the choreographer Johanne Saunier. This choice was also a way of paying homage to Glenn Gould who dreamed of making the piano disappear, that there would no longer be any intermediary between the music and him. »
