Blue Hour

Presentation

From Hilde­gard of Bin­gen to Phil­ippe Hersant, from Hart­mann to Shos­takovich, L’Heure Bleue brings togeth­er works sep­ar­ated by cen­tur­ies yet united by the same ques­tion: how, in the heart of dark­ness, can we con­tin­ue to believe in light?

At the heart of the pro­gramme lies Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s deeply mov­ing Con­certo fun­èbre. Com­posed in 1939 by a musi­cian fiercely opposed to Nazism, it is at once a cry of revolt, an act of res­ist­ance and a pro­found expres­sion of faith in the future. Its dark­ness is answered by the vis­ion­ary, lumin­ous music of Hilde­gard of Bin­gen. Between these two worlds, Phil­ippe Hersant’s Une vis­ion d’Hildegarde forms a true bridge between mys­tic­al vis­ion and vis­ions of hell, while Shos­takovich extends this ten­sion through the vis­cer­al power of his Two Pieces for String Oct­et.

In a stripped-back sta­ging, nine musi­cians move through a sound­scape of silence and light. Like the blue hour — that fra­gile moment between the end­ing night and the dawn­ing day — the per­form­ance cre­ates a sus­pen­ded sense of time, at the pre­cise instant when night still hes­it­ates before giv­ing way to light.