string quartet

Premiere: March 27, 2022, La mémoire équivoque — Portrait de Jean Lesage, Montréal (Québec)

On the shores of creation, time deposits a foam filled with small fragments, made of strange and diverse materials. Here we find the fragment of a motif, the sketch of a gesture, and there, the reflection of past colours like lost glances that probe time for the lack of being able to land on it … Heterogeneous objects, obsolescence, nostalgia … the poet-composer contemplates these crystallizations of the mind, he questions them, reinvents a history for them, he dreams.

From his cogitations, enigmatic mosaics are born, where sound beings appear in a somewhat mysterious way: telescoped cadences, suspended ornaments, rocketing strokes, unresolved dissonances … At other times, the eras briefly collide, suddenly making the notion of anachronism quite relative.

Above all, Jean Lesage’s music seems to speak to us of time, that of the fleeting moment which reverberates through other moments and whose successive traces remaining in the consciousness form the discourse.

Lesage reinvents an imaginary and free time like that in a dream, seeming to float like a question without an answer.

Serge Provost [ii-22]