...like a human voice

In the castle’s grand salon

Estelle Gourinchas, viola; Lou Véniant, piano.

Unfortunately, the concert featuring the TRIO ZERLINE has had to be postponed to a later date. Estelle Gourinchas, the violist of the TRIO ZERLINE, will instead present a duo programme that also focuses on works by composers from France. She will be accompanied on the piano by Lou Véniant. 

Works by Nadia Boulanger, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Gabriel Fauré, Charles Gounod, Edward Elgar, Camille Saint-Saëns, Reynaldo Hahn, Francis Poulenc, Jules Massenet and Maurice Ravel. 

This recital explores the idea of music as an inner voice, as a voice without words, born of silence and dreams, and evoking emotional states. It presents a suite of transcriptions of melodies drawn mainly from the early 20th-century French repertoire and that of its close contemporaries. 

In this journey, the viola is not merely a solo instrument: it becomes an imaginary human voice, capable of conveying the inflections of the singing voice—with which it shares its range—whilst retaining a sense of shadow and introspective distance that is unique to its timbre. 

The programme thus explores various states of this ‘voice without words’: the emergence of a dream, the suspension of time, more turbulent emotions, and a gradual shift towards memory and inner reflection. The music unfolds through a succession of breaths and emotional landscapes, with the bow becoming a breath and the musical line becoming speech. 

Gradually, this voice thickens, becomes more expressive, almost spoken in its inner tension, before dissolving once more into a form of meditation. The transcription of vocal melodies for viola plays an essential role here: it does not seek to reproduce the singing, but to preserve its imprint, as if the text had vanished, leaving only the momentum, supported by an atmospheric piano.