The Monte-Carlo Spring Arts Festival concluded this Sunday, April 2, after numerous concerts featuring talented artists. Today, we look back at the evening of Thursday, March 30, during which we spoke with pianist Camille Taver.
The Spring Arts Festival is a multidisciplinary event at the intersection of the arts.
Reading with Music
On Thursday, March 30, at the Princess Grace Theatre, prose and piano united. Pianist Camille Taver improvised in harmony with Laurent Stocker, reading large excerpts from Rimbaud the Son.
Rimbaud the Son is a book by Pierre Michon, published by Gallimard in 1991, the centenary of poet Arthur Rimbaud’s death. It presents itself as a “critical fiction” on the existential and literary trajectory of the young Rimbaud. The author freely explores and “interprets” the life and art of the poet.
Thus, during this evening, Camille Taver set music to excerpts by Pierre Michon, a prose text characterized by a sparing use of punctuation and long sentences. Sometimes in sync with the reading, sometimes as a musical interlude, to illustrate and create atmospheres. The text and the piano listened to one another, influencing each other. Indeed, it was improvisation. The melodies stemmed from the rhythm and tone given by Laurent Stocker during his reading. They depended on each other, guided by emotion.
You cannot erase; the unexpected can be a sort of mistake. You want to do something but can’t achieve it, or on the contrary, it can lead to something even better.
Camille Taver
What endlessly reignites literature? What makes men write? Other men, their mother, the stars, or the enormous old things, God, the language?
Pierre Michon
Camille Taver, Improvisational Pianist
Camille Taver discovered a passion for the piano and particularly for musical digressions thanks to the melodies heard during his childhood. His parents, music lovers, listened to classical music every evening. It was then on the family piano that he tried to play the themes he had previously heard.
After high school, he joined the Paris Conservatory, a program combining piano and classical musical language training with improvisation and composition. Once his studies were complete, the pianist engaged in many cine-concerts, through which he began to make a living from his passion.
Regarding his favorite composers who inspired him, Camille shared with us that “Wagner is a kind of amniotic fluid,” music with which he is very familiar. He also particularly appreciates 20th-century music, including works by Schรถnberg and Scriabin.
The piano, a story that began in his childhood. But what does he find so captivating about this musical instrument? For Camille, the piano is the quintessential romantic instrument “you almost have an orchestra at your fingertips, a very wide range of expressions.” Then, in piano improvisation, it is the dual role that attracts him, that of being a performer while also composing live “I love the simplicity of the contact with the piano, a physical contact accompanied by an intellectual construction of music, you think something and it happens.”
