Whilst rereading the conversation between Sandrine Piau and David Kadouch about their upcoming album, I came across a scent. Not a specific perfume, sitting on a dressing table, trapped in its bottle, with a fashion designer’s name and a melancholic muse gazing out to sea in a dress that’s far too sheer. No. A scent encountered in a station. Someone walks past. We might not even have noticed them. Already, the skin that carries it is moving away. All that remains is a trace, almost nothing, a tiny hint that something took place. Perhaps that is what an album is.
It is believed that an album captures music. In reality, it captures above all the impossibility of capturing it. A voice, a piano, a breath, an attack, a pedal, an inflection, a second of letting go: all of this, in the everyday life of a concert, disappears as it happens. Sound is a boneless creature. It passes, it quivers, it dissolves. The record, for its part, attempts to salvage a little of this vanishing act. It does not preserve life. It retains an imprint of it.
Sandrine Piau and David Kadouch’s project is called Voyage intime. It will be released in the autumn. A fine title, because it promises neither a postcard nor a marked-out itinerary. The journey, here, does not consist of setting off from Vienna to arrive in Paris with a connection in Munich and a lost suitcase at Liège-Guillemins, although the lost suitcase remains one of the purest forms of applied metaphysics. It is a more elusive journey, more inward-looking, harder to stamp in a passport.
A journey through the states of the soul.
Sandrine Piau puts it very well: putting together a recital means piecing together little stories to create a larger one. A Lied, a melody, a miniature: each piece contains a world. One must then decide in what order these worlds relate to one another, respond to one another, contradict one another or shed light on one another. It is architecture built from dreams. We borrow from composers, poets, the dead and the living, then arrange it all on a table like objects found in a room after someone has left.
For Piau and Kadouch, the journey does not merely take us from one place to another. It takes us from life towards that which threatens it, from memory towards that which erases it, from love towards that which may perhaps survive it. At the beginning, a siren gently lures a child towards death. At the end, La mort des amants suggests the opposite possibility: love, at least, does not allow itself to be entirely buried. In between, the recital seems to pose this dreadfully simple question: what do we do with the passing of time?
The answer may lie in movement.
Death, says Sandrine Piau, is the guillotine that falls upon movement. As long as there is movement—even almost nothing, even a breath, even a mist on blue lips—something still resists. I find this image deeply appealing. It avoids grand rhetoric. Life is no longer an idea. It is a remnant of warmth. A fragile vapour. A sign that it is not quite too late.
David Kadouch, for his part, speaks of music as a place where one can relive emotions for the first time. It is a magnificent phrase, because it touches on the strange injustice of our lot as living beings. We spend our time losing what we experience. Even moments of happiness slip away the very moment they arrive. Music, at times, reopens the door. We know the notes, and yet they begin anew. We know what is going to happen, and yet the experience remains fresh. The same record. The same melody. The same phrase. But not the same evening, not the same body, not the same weariness, not the same love, not the same fear.
This, no doubt, is the poetry of memory.
Not remembering faithfully — the task of a court clerk, admirable but insufficient — but allowing what was to return in a different way. Like a scent. We do not reconstruct the person who wore it. We do not recover their face, nor their destination, nor the platform where they alighted. We recover only the tiny ripple they left behind.
In this conversation, Piau also speaks of her scepticism and her attraction to the Mystery. I love this paradox: a non-religious singer whose voice has predestined her for the angels. Opera and melody thrive on this sort of contradiction. They know that we do not necessarily believe in what we sing, but that we still need to draw near to it. Music does not convert. It allows us to brush against it. That is already a great deal.
Peut-être est-ce même son élégance suprême : elle ne force pas la croyance, elle suspend l’incrédulité. Elle ne répond pas à la question de la mort, elle lui offre une chambre d’écho. Elle ne console pas toujours, mais elle accompagne. Et, dans les meilleurs cas, elle nous permet de regarder l’abîme en continuant à respirer.
Voilà ce que ce disque semble vouloir faire : non pas raconter un voyage, mais sauver quelques tonalités du passage. Un peu de tristesse, un peu de doute, beaucoup de vie, quelques paysages vus par la fenêtre du train, des valises égarées, une sirène, des amants morts, une buée, des anges, et ce parfum dans une gare que personne n’aura su retenir.
Il paraîtra à l’automne.
Ce qui est bien choisi.
L’automne est la saison des voyages immobiles. Les arbres partent sans bouger. Les feuilles prennent congé avec une politesse spectaculaire. La lumière décline, mais ne renonce pas tout à fait. On y comprend mieux que chaque beauté est une forme de départ, et que le rôle des artistes consiste parfois à se tenir sur le quai, juste avant que le train ne s’ébranle, pour noter ce que les autres n’auront pas vu.
Sandrine Piau et David Kadouch ne promettent pas de nous conduire quelque part.
Ils promettent mieux.
Nous rappeler que nous sommes déjà en route.
