He admits it: “To rub shoulders with all these big names of the young classical scene, for me who doesn’t even have a conservatory diploma for my instrument, it’s intimidating!” At 27, Grégoire Blanc is a UFO on the French music scene. This former engineer from Arts et Métiers, endowed with solid training as a cellist, embarked on a crazy project three years ago: to make a career with the instrument he had fallen in love with a few years earlier.
“One of those that we put too easily in the category ‘cabinet of curiosities’, but which offers a potential for expression and a unique poetic dimension”, he assures. Instrument whose colors he defends again this year at the Les Étoiles du Classique festival in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And more particularly during its opening concert called “The Mystery Box”: the theremin.
“It’s true that with its intriguing look, this instrument, which dates back to 1919 but has never stopped evolving since, going from tube to transistors, even digital, has everything of a mystery box”, s amused the young man behind his Roaring Twenties mustache.
Presented in the form of an electronic box extended by two antennas, to which it is enough to approach the hands to change as if by magic the frequency and the volume of the sound produced, “it is the only musical instrument which integrates into this not the human body as given by its invoice, he continues. The interpreter acts as an electrode. Which in addition to the unreal sound it emits makes it hyperexpressive. It is no coincidence that most of its performers were cellists or violinists by training… Unlike the synthesizer, which is only a machine that is programmed to trigger sound events, there, the man is here the extension of the instrument.” An expressive dimension that fascinates the public.
And challenges at a time when the debate on artificial intelligence is raging. “When I started to take an interest in the history of this instrument, on the sidelines of a physics course in high school, I was struck to see that at the time when Léon Thérémine, its inventor, was making its tours around the world to present it, the press looked at this instrument of the future with circumspection. Already worrying that machines could replace humans in the artistic and musical field. We know today that this was not the case, but we find many similarities with the discussions we have around AI today.
Hence the need to continue to defend this instrument, “which, like the arpeggione, came close to extinction. Twenty or thirty years ago, there were only two performers left in the world. And while there are a handful of manufacturers like Moog left in the United States, there isn’t a class anywhere to teach it.” He himself was able to perfect his self-taught knowledge with the Berliner Carolina Eyck, for a long time one of the only ambassadors of the theremin, for whom Régis Campo composed one of the rare original works for theremin and orchestra five years ago.
Because “the big black point of the theremin remains the repertoire. The Martenot waves have taken everything! Probably because as the latter have a keyboard, they offer composers a more reassuring benchmark.” Injustice with which Grégoire Blanc composes by offering his own transcriptions of the great repertoire (drawn in particular from opera). And that he hopes to repair by giving the instrument as much visibility as possible. Including in the context of classic events “open and benevolent enough to welcome us.”
Like the Stars of the classic. Created last year, in the midst of the post-Covid period, by violinist Thomas Lefort with the desire to “give young musicians a voice”, the event welcomes each summer, in the castle park and in different places of the city, no less than 200 young classical virtuosos! Many are already part, like Thomas, of the well-identified stars of the new generation. From the Moreau family to violinist and composer Élise Bertrand.
Passing by the cellist Anastasia Kobekina. Others still on the rise. Like the soprano Apolline Raï-Westphal, discovered in Gluck’s Armide this winter at the Opéra Comique, and who will be one of the star guests at the closing concert of the event, this Sunday, in the presence of the sponsors, Jean-Claude Casadesus and Karine Deshayes.
The stars of the classic: from June 29 to July 2, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Yvelines). www.lesetoilesduclassique.fr
