Festival Archipel 2018, Genève - Priez pour le pauvre gaspard

D.R.

«Pray for poor Gaspard» (Verlaine)

Incidentally, Archipel 2018 charts a panorama of young Spanish music. After Posadas and Parra, here is the most recent generation with Nuria Gimenez-Comas (1980), a student of Michael Jarrell at the Geneva School of Music, now pursuing a brilliant international career. Fruit of the latest research in music technology and real-time sound transformation, Back into Nothingness by Nuria Gimenez-Comas, set to a text by Laure Gauthier (1972), was ordered by Archipel and co-produced with Ircam, Grame and the TNP in Villeurbanne. This show for narrator, choir and electronics was created by the actress Anna Clémenti and the choir Spirito from Lyon, directed by Giuseppe Frigeni. It is no longer a tale of fundamental physics, but the true story of the child

found in 1828 at the gates of Nuremberg: Kaspar Hauser emerged from seventeen years of captivity during which he had lost his ability to speak and his tragic story moved the whole of Romantic Europe. As the mythic figure of a wild child, his fate inspired poems, novels and films, from Paul Verlaine, Georg Trakl, Peter Handke, Werner Herzog and symbolist engravings to Max Klinger. Like a deleted program, the innocent whiteness of his spirit was the painful theatre of linguistic and cognitive re-education. Kaspar is the child-machine with an erased brain that people wanted to reboot by cramming information into it, as if he was a robot. He resists scientific experimentation using a primitive language which is singing (24 March, Alhambra).