03.10.2024

PATRICIA PETIBON returns to Vienna’s Musikverein with Poulenc’s "La Voix humaine"

No stranger to Poulenc’s masterful one-act opera, this upcoming recital follows Petibon’s resounding success in 2023 at the Opera national du Rhin in Strasbourg, in which she was hailed as an artist at the “peak of her art”. This description is all the more impressive, considering the range of emotion required of the performer, who must portray an entire emotional spectrum from fantasy, madness, despair, resignation and rebirth. With this piano version of the score, Petibon feels there is more scope for an intimate and raw portrayal of Poulenc’s writing.

As a successor of his most well-known opera Dialogues des Carmélites, La Voix Humaine retains the spirit of the former work, which contains a leitmotif in moments of reflection, of courage, but also of fear of death. This leitmotif also continues harmonically in La Voix humaine, through the moments of fear, of the lover or of self-dissolution. In Petibon’s interpretation, she chooses to give the work a feminist twist not originally intended when written as a play by Jean Cocteau in 1930.

With this in mind, with the first half of the evening’s programme Petibon and Manoff have developed a concept interweaving what are on the surface short, playful extracts of the well-known children’s story of Babar the elephant and his wife Céleste, a work also set to music by Francis Poulenc. Here however, the duo are drawing a parallel between Barbar and the nameless man in the second half, who appears as egotistical and infantile in La Voix humaine.