NEWS

Lucas Debargue

3 days ago

Starting busy November !

5.11 recital at Piano Lyon in Lyon Salle Molière.

8.11 in Leipzig Gewandhaus with Kremerata Baltica Chamber Orchestra and Gidon Kremer - playing Mozart Piano Concerto in E-Flat Major K 449.

13.11 Improvisations with Jean-Baptiste Doulcet in Hannover Villa Seligmann

15.11 recital in Muri, Switzerland at Festsaal Kloster Muri.

Tour with Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz and maestro Michael Francis in Festsaal Ludwigshafen:
20.11 in Bietigheim-Bissingen Kronensaal,
21.11 in Festhalle Wörth-am-Rhein playing Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue and Ravel Piano Concerto in G.

Schloss Elmau Verbier Festival
23.11 in concert with Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra and maestro Gábor Takács-Nagy, playing Mozart Piano Concerto in E-Flat Major K 449.
26.11 in Fauré Piano quartet with Augustin Dumay, Blythe Teh Engstroem and Bruno Delepelaire. Very happy and honoured for the German premiere of my own Piano Quintet with Vivek Jayaraman, Filip Fenrych (violin), Natanael Ferreira (viola) and Joël Marosi (cello ).
26.11 also Schostakovich Piano Quintet with James Ehnes, Clara-Jumi Kang, Sào Soulez Larivière and Bruno Delepelaire.
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Lucas Debargue updated their cover photo.

3 days ago

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Lucas Debargue

2 weeks ago

:::The Student, the Poet, and the Tongue:::

We’re all students, ever since we were thrown into the world with a scream. First, by imitating our parents to learn to walk and talk, and by mimicking their genuine or made-up changes of mood. Some of us even imitated the very real beatings they got at home by bullying their schoolmates in return.

One day, we feel in our guts that we carry an individual life and mind in an individual body. This feeling is scary. We could start walking our own way and speaking with our own voice, but we’re also attracted by the security of continuing to imitate. We even have the possibility to follow the group of self-proclaimed “rebels” who consider themselves free-minded, not like the others — “the sheep” who stupidly believe in the “official truth.” Yes, we can comfortably join the group of alternative-truth believers, with the additional comfort of feeling superior to the “weak.” Another way to avoid feeling the great bleeding abyss inside — to escape loneliness and the sound of our own heartbeats counting down too loudly.

The poet is born from this bleeding abyss in which echo the pulses of his heart. He is born from the awareness of the fragility of our human condition — a feeling shared by every human being on this planet. He used to be a student, just as the butterfly used to be a caterpillar. He learned the tongue and how to walk without holding his parents’ warm hands. He is born from the feeling of his nakedness — but not as naked as the student was at the very beginning. He sees death, feels it in his guts, and is not afraid to let himself be afraid of it. Then he starts to hear the tongue he learned to speak resounding within him, in a way it had never spoken before. He begins to sense how much this tongue can express his despair, ecstasy, sorrow, love. At first, when he opens his mouth to release this fruit from his soul, only slime, drool, and vomit come out. He feels ashamed of it and doesn’t want anyone to see, hear, or smell it.

Most of the time, the first spark of the poet remains the last. Because the feeling of individuality is frightening, and is quickly seen as a “prey” left to an imaginary herd waiting to devour it. We are taught this way: to protect ourselves, to see the world and other lives as threats, making our creative brain the slave of its small reptilian part.

Staying a student forever is appealing, but now there’s a crack somewhere in the soul. It may have been as brief as lightning, but the feeling of death and the fragility of our condition have passed through, and the wound now remains open — one cannot ignore it.
Then, staying a student becomes a conscious choice, an answer to anxiety. It is no longer a child learning with wide, fascinated eyes and ears, hands and heart fully open: it’s a busy young adult, lacking sleep while fighting for his professional career. He calculates, invests, in order to reach a precise goal: the student in him now learns how to elbow his way to the top, how to use the tongue to serve himself in the name of the art form he has chosen. He understands that he can’t make it without force — leaving some dead bodies on the road — or without creating a safe consensus around him. Thus, the paved paths of cynicism and flattery open before him, both requiring the coldest control as magical boots to walk on them.

But some just give up on that. They believe that something else can be achieved — not against the wound, but from it. They don’t play any game, or rather, they declare themselves happy losers before it has even begun. They don’t compete: neither to get a partner, nor a name. They dream, and use their legs and tongue to climb higher and higher, closer to their vision. They ignore sarcasm as a language unknown to their hearts. They see the fingers pointed at them with compassion for their owners. When they speak, it’s their own voice that we hear. When they play music, it’s only music playing through them. There is something funny about their bodies, “unusual” to some eyes: they don’t follow. They don’t look around, but straight ahead. Their laughter is like the wind in the trees, and their tears like a dying bird. When people around are celebrating with loud fireworks, they’re often sitting alone with a book in the quietest corner of the house; when people are whining together around a table, it’s common that they burst into sudden enthusiasm. They don’t call Shakespeare, Rembrandt, or Chopin “gods,” “geniuses,” or “masters,” but “brothers.” They seem too arrogant to those who are easily impressed, and too humble for those who are hard to satisfy. They’re not surprised to see crowds cheering at the feet of despots, and imitators far more revered than creators. They don’t have proper friends or enemies — rather, living examples or counterexamples. They’re skeptical of the portrait of an extraordinary artist who would be polite, mute, disciplined, always organized, and fully in control.

We’re all poets in the making, since we started to feel the wound of life bleeding inside us — and because we can all deeply relate to these few things I just mentioned. Being a poet is not a profession: it has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of paid service most of us must carry on for a living. It’s lucidity in action and love everywhere, all the time, by any means. Why not start living like the poets we are, right now?

On the last evening of my 35th year, in a plane from Tallinn to Frankfurt.

Picture : young Scriabin.

LD ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

3 weeks ago

Happy to present to you my PIANO TRIO no. 2 !👇YOUTUBE link in comments. 👇Here it is : the June premiere in Festival des Forêts - Compiègne (France), played by the incomparable David Castrobalbi and Alexandre Castro-Balbi, recorded and filmed by the impeccable Charly Mandon - Chronos Productions.
::: A little more about the creation of the trio.
When I finished working on the 3rd (!) version of my first piano trio in February 2019, I could hardly imagine I would write a second one 5 years after - and for the same friends, with whom we play together as a trio for 10 years already !
“In what style do you write?”, “What’s your music about?” - these questions, often asked to me as a composer, don’t reflect anything I could associate with my writing. I don’t compose in any “style”; this word, for me, has nothing to do with music but with a certain way of looking at it (rather than listening), putting it into boxes. Neither do I write “about” anything. I hear music inside me and do my best to transcribe it with notes.
The initial inspiration can come at any time: for this trio, the main theme (which opens the piece directly, without introduction) simply appeared in my mind while I was on vacation for a day in August 2024 at my father’s place in the south of France. I wrote down this four-bar melody, and then the music “worked by itself” in my mind for a while before I could write it down. The second theme came to me naturally, derived from the first — they’re rhythmically complementary and not very opposed in character. During this phase, I can hear the theme in the bass, or in the major mode, or modulating, or augmented, diminished, reversed… The music develops like a lucid dream. I never use any instrument, so as not to “pollute” the process with what I would see as self-indulgent instrumentalism: I reserve composition at the instrument for the moment of improvisation.
The first movement was entirely sketched in September 2024.The idea for the second movement, a restless scherzo, directly derives from the main theme of the first movement and introduces all the musical material for the third — also derived from the original thematic material exposed in the first movement. It demands merciless virtuosity and nerve from all three musicians.The third movement, a largo, imposed itself as a finale. While the first two movements are in classical sonata form, this one required a custom-made structure, tending toward symphonic grandeur.
I never think of particular feelings, colors, or atmospheres when I compose: I am simply swimming in the music itself. But afterwards, it’s very common for me to poetically associate some of my pieces with words - and also share the « making off » of it as I just did, a posteriori. With this trio, I somehow associate the first two movements with “the sea” and the last one with a prayer. But that doesn’t mean the music is supposed to communicate this specifically to the listener: someone may hear fire where someone else hears water, etc. I don’t believe that music can describe anything; when it seems to, it’s because words have been added to it as an introduction or a comment.
I hope you enjoy this music as much as I do… LD" ... Voir plusVoir moins