Thierry Machuel

Composer and pianist Thierry Machuel devotes most of his work to choral art with texts by contemporary authors in many languages. His repertoire highlights the link between poetry, languages and cultures, and has grown into a choral repertoire that covers more than forty countries and territories. He was made a Lauréat of Académie de France in Rome for 1996-98 and of Casa de Velázquez for 1999-2001. He was awarded the Prix Sacem de la Musique Vocale in 2008, a 2009 grant from Fondation Beaumarchais and won the Grand Prix Lycéen des Compositeurs in 2011. His choral works are sung in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and were part of the French baccalauréat curriculum in 2013 and 2014.

Thierry Machuel’s residency project formed around a dialogue between Paul Celan’s poem Stretto and texts by Sankichi Tōge, from his Poems of the Atomic Bomb collection, in a work for two singers, two narrators and a string quartet. German, Japanese and French intermingle; song extends the spoken voice’s scope of expression, immerging the listener in the sound of poetic speech. Language, at the heart of the work, part silence, par counter-language, becomes a place in which to reinvent a liveable world. Meanwhile, the strings unfold in a different temporality to the voices, remote from the sound or meaning of the words. Theirs is a bitter, subterranean narrative, constantly replenishing.