Stefan Zweig's look back at the century of Magellan, a time when trade was becoming global thanks to the sea lanes, is of great interest to us today. By promising Charles Quint,
King of Spain, the end of Portugal's monopoly on spices, Magellan was tackling immense geopolitical, religious, economic, technical and commercial issues. Motivated by an uncommon thirst for discovery, Magellan embarked on a challenge at the beginning of the 16th century that was as dizzying as setting foot on Mars in our own time... whatever the cost!
With his Magellan, Zweig takes us on a breathless journey through an unprecedented naval expedition, the first circumnavigation in history. This race for rarity (spices), which arouses the spirit of adventure and innovation as well as the greatest fantasies of fortune at the cost of many human lives (at sea and on land), echoes the contemporary issues surrounding raw materials, rare metals and energy sources. Yesterday spices, today minerals for electric batteries or electronic chips, desire and fascination on the one hand, the impact of limitless trade on the other, power at the centre. How can we fail to think of all those containers of goods crossing the oceans today, of the exploitation of part of humanity to satiate the appetite for consumption of a handful of the richest human beings?
After two trio programmes, CLOVER has chosen to broaden its horizons. We have sought that point of balance where the music and the text go hand in hand without cancelling each other out. Two narratives that are often intertwined and that also allow themselves the freedom of a rearranged chronology. It was obvious that with Lila Tamazit and Myriam Rignol we could build this bridge between text and music, between words and sounds, between the viola de gamba (Magellan's contemporary instrument) and our more modern instruments. We composed and (re)arranged pieces adapted to this new crew and to the rhythm of the story. Sometimes the group drifts and the sequences are improvised to the sound of the text, when it's not the voice itself that wanders to the beat of the music.
By navigating Zweig's story without revealing all of it, we wanted to offer the possibility of imagining the missing parts and, above all, to trigger the desire to continue the adventure by reading the complete work.
PURCHASE VIA BANDCAMP