“Maurice Roche, who died in 1997, had been a very dear friend since 1972 (the year I turned 20 and gave my first public concerts). I set his texts (my first chamber opera, Le Baigneur, which I premiered in 1982 with Michel Hermon, is adapted from one of his books, Opéra Bouffe) and exchanged many emotions, thoughts and music with him. He liked my piano work and was very interested in all new music: he had in fact studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire and begun a musical career (composing the music for the premiere of Pichette's Epiphanies with Gérard Philipe and Maria Casarès). Music would remain one of his essential preoccupations throughout his life, to the extent that it was, I believe, a constituent of his literary creation. He was also fascinated by Monteverdi and all the pre-Baroque composers, something else that contributed to bringing us closer.
I was quite touched by his final book, Un petit rien-du-tout tout neuf plié dans une feuille de persil (Gallimard). This monologue of the writer at the end of his life, recalling the child he had been, is doubtless his most accessible, most emotional text. It is both funny and moving, profound and diabolical, as was Maurice.

I adapted it for the stage in the form of a monologue accompanied by music, like a modern melodrama, a small, recited ‘opera’ accompanied by a piano. This piano/voice form, which I had already experimented with using another of his texts (Portrait de l’Artiste, with Caroline Gautier, performed in Geneva and Paris), is, I feel, well adapted to his universe. In fact, it seems to me that the piano is perpetually hinted at in his books and that melodrama, where the voice is constantly guided by the music, enables the spectator to plunge into the intimacy of his writing.
For Roche, childhood was a place of absolute truth: listening to him, you have the impression of having never been so intelligent, perspicacious and lucid about the human condition as when you were a child. And it is written with such elegance that everyone can feel moved by this account and recognize our destiny in this caustic vision.
We often wanted to adapt his texts for the stage, him reciting, me playing the piano. Having had the unfortunate idea of dying, he will not hold it against me if I prolong his voice with that of the lovely actress Irina Dalle and dedicate this performance to our long friendship.”

DENIS LEVAILLANT

Le Figaro - 26 March 2006

Denis Levaillant, who has always been ready for innovative theatrical or choreographic adventures, was a friend of Maurice Roche’s, and in this brief, delicate show, we find the full power of affection and admiration.
The lovely, animated Irina Dalle has the mischievousness that is appropriate for Maurice Roche: that mocking sentimentality and seriousness hidden behind the jokes.
Roche’s text is quite beautiful, very touching and very funny. It is a lovely moment, elegant and refined, that is offered to us, and we shouldn’t refuse it.
Armelle Hélio

Elle - 20 Marh 2006

Denis Levaillant has written a joyous marche macabre. Accompanied by actress Irina Dalle, Levaillant chants, recites and sings this tender and trash ‘Poil de carotte’*. The pianist-actress duo is as poetic and violent as the dialogue between the narrator and orchestra in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat. This is a fine way of giving new life to a sickly kid, musician and writer, born on the Day of the Dead, 2 November 1924.
It is also a fine way of questioning the mechanism of memory and immersing ourselves in childhood again, real childhood—full of anguishes and wonderment, shame and desires.
Sandra Bash
*Translator’s note: A French classic by Jules Renard, published in 1894, about an unloved boy nicknamed ‘Poil de carotte’ on account of his red hair.


Impact Medecine

This show teems with freshness, tenderness and fantasy moulded on Irina Dalle. This actress-singer-mime-dancer is grace incarnate. In duo with composer-pianist Denis Levaillant, she embodies the precariousness of the childhood of writer Maurice Roche and his candor, insolence and fantasy. At the piano, Denis Levaillant provides a piquant, serious counterpoint. All three of them lead us into the spellbinding magic of childhood. It lasts an hour, and we wish it would never end.

Testimony by Salim Jay, writer and friend of Maurice Roche

I have something to say about this work, which is a bit difficult to admit: by my tastes as a spectator as well as a reader, this is the happiest show I have ever seen in my whole life!
Weightiness sustains a defeat, and grace is afraid of getting a slap in the face, but no! The laughter is not sly. All perfidy suddenly cancelled; here is the music of being in the world, played in keeping with a kid’s fantasy, and his astonishments recited like a carpet of oxymoron unfolds. Between the putative old man and the child who has become chimerical, on the canvas where Maurice Roche reigns, the sound show composed and played by Denis Levaillant welcomes a dancer whose movements suggest calligraphy: Irina Dalle.
Just as the sense is manifold, and the memory a way of forgetting one area or another, the show makes memory and disappearance come bursting forth, the visible and the not-knowing, old disgusts and new threats, immemorial, to make you crafty.
And yet this is music, from a whistling prank into submerging silence. All the joy of living in a sprig of parsley? Is chewing really the solution? A chemistry of affects and events reinvents the passage on earth as a danceable, undanceable summary. In Denis Levaillant, Maurice Roche’s personality has found an interpreter who pulls his own weight with the loyalty of an expert-handed accomplice. In what? That is the question!

Initially, this creation looked like a challenge: how to write a full-length ballet score for symphony orchestra that would not simply be a rehashing of what Delibes, Tchaikovsky or Adam had done in the 19th century, but indeed my vision of ballet music for today. Laying hold of history through the imagination: that was my answer. For me, music is the language of passions and the unconscious. Martine Kahane's subject and the way Patrice Bart wanted to treat it convinced me straight off that I could go in that direction.
I had already written about a dozen scores for contemporary choreographers and am quite familiar with dance, having practiced it and accompanied it on the piano. But this collaboration with the Paris Opera Ballet was my first commission for a classical ballet. What was important to me above all was the idea of creating a work accessible to a wide audience. I enjoy telling stories to people, giving them a listening context that attracts them and enables them to open up to the unknown. I wanted to give resonance to the Little Dancer's dream of becoming a star, a bit like an opera without voices where the music expresses the heroine's drives. Nor was my intention to be faithful to the historical account, but to give it a contemporary form: making a modern tale out of an old story.

Contrary to what is customarily done, it was necessary to write a scenario and then begin composing the music. The narrative plot of the subject is strong, and it was essential to first "sit down at the table" - as in the theatre - to cut up each scene. It was the author and scriptwriter Orlando de Rudder who was in charge of this preparatory work, and that helped me a great deal, as I was thus able to compose my music around a clear, precise structure. The idea was not to give the characters a psychological profile, but rather to define situations. This is what I call my "tropisms": for me, music does not spring from images but from human relationships, man's relations with the world, dramatic situations through which I project myself. I have always proceeded like this in the theatre, relying on a preliminary reading of the staging (and I could do the same for a film score). For example, it seemed obvious to me from the beginning that the incidental music for "l'Atelier" (the studio) had to be very slow, as if "frozen", thus depicting the Little Dancer's morbid fascination for her statue. The character of the Mother, a sort of wicked stepmother, should provoke a feeling of anxiety throughout the work, this explaining the asymmetrical rhythmic pattern and strange, harsh colours that are heard in the scenes in which the Mother appears, such as the one where she forbids her daughter to have any dreams.
Here, the music is in the position of a "subjective camera". One hears what the Little Dancer imagines, one listens to her reverie, perceiving it and, I hope, feeling and understanding it. To succeed at that, I almost changed into the "Little Dancer" for a year! All the situations in the score are imaginary: the dance class, the grand ball at the Opera and even the prison. The dream is permanent, with what that implies in terms of contractions or stretching of time, premonitions, transpositions and reminiscences.

It was in this spirit that I composed a grand waltz, an implacable dance class rhythmic pattern, cabaret music and pas de deux melodies, always maintaining the color of my music and applying techniques similar to film ("cut" montage, mixing of very different colors, flash-back, displacement, reversal, etc.). From beginning to end of the score, one can hear the result of intense work on harmony, rhythm (often jazzy), melody and orchestral colour. I chose an orchestra of sixty musicians, where the winds are in pairs but often change instruments and are all in turn "outside". One thus hears rarely-used colours, like the oboe d'amore (for all the melodies depicting the dream of being a star), contrabassoon, piccolo trumpet, alto flute, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone, as well as an accordion that blends with the strings and the woodwinds. All the soloists have privileged moments, from the solo violin in the pas de deux of the first act to the solo cello in the "white ballet" of the second act. The trombone has important phrases, the clarinet and trumpet have difficult parts in the "Black Cat" scenes, and the timpanist is in constant demand, as is the keyboard, the piano having a concertante role in the ball and at the end of the ballet. In this 400-page score, there is a wide variety of colours that are often novel for this type of symphonic ensemble.
By composing thus for winds in pairs and anxious for the form to be clear at first hearing, with a structure both strong and hidden, I am placing myself within a tradition that is, I believe, quite French. This way of thinking music suits me fine: structured, finely worked - despite its easy appearance - and open to a kind of unconsciousness. From Rameau to Ravel, I see it as a tree trunk on which I graft my own branches: the rhythmic and harmonic language that I drew from jazz, improvisation, the American avant-garde and all kinds of folk tunes. Achieving this synthesis in the framework of a classical ballet nowadays is rather exciting. For me, it is a matter of working towards a new type of spectacle, where I no longer propose "contemporary", but a French symphonic music decked out in the colors of our time and, with its melodies easy to memorise, aimed at a wide audience.

Denis Levaillant
From an interview with Laure Guilbert, May 2003

Zapping from the last Morse code message sent by US ships at Pearl Harbor to the presentation of the first pressure-cooker at the Lépine competition for inventions in Paris, this is the memory of radio, live broadcasting and the moment of shared emotion, sitting round the "wireless", which are evoked in storybook manner by Denis Levaillant, that music writer. In Eloge de la Radio, music speaks, suggests and absorbs the world while telling about it. As in "scratching" from one station to another, the spectator/listener crosses the country of the bizarre, the country of exploits, rhythm and space… From voyage to voyage, the music, naïve and refined, slides merrily from orchestral writing to radio archives. It absorbs the sound, returns to the note and mixes the listening. But, above all, it skillfully integrates two exceptional soloists on stage: two radio sound-effects engineers. Starting from everyday objects, these illusionists reveal to us the secrets of an enchanted sound world that is gradually constructed before our eyes.
Benoît Thiebergien

TELERAMA
“The intimate relationship that each of us has with the radio should ensure the recognition and gratitude of a broad audience for this work and its author, who is little concerned with the coterie mentality.”

DIAPASON
“Eloge de la radio [...] is a successful production, both popular and sophisticated—something quite rare.”

WEBCITY (www.webcity.fr)
“Denis Levaillant obviously set out to enjoy himself when composing his Eloge de la Radio. If we are to judge the pleasure afforded by this veritable show, he won his wager. A fine moment of music, full of brainwaves, humility and intelligence.”

DAUPHINE LIBERE
“This universe, as fabulous as you might wish and spiced up with Denis Levaillant’s humour, cleverly combines excerpts from radio archives and instrumental colours as simple as they are refined. The whole forms a lively, gripping work that carries the audience along in a delightful moment.”

MONDOMIX
“Announced as a musical fairytale, the affair suggests a radio cartoon. More influenced by Tex Avery than by South Park, evoking the wireless more than a pop station, the piece is slightly nostalgic for the future. Memories of Radio-France, the BBC or elsewhere get along well with the destructured boogies and hyperharmonic sonatas. This evening, radio waves are decidedly creating pleasure.”

A pianist and a magician teaming up: the idea might appear formal, a way of staging a recital, enticing the public by promising it that, for lack of something to hear, it will have something to watch. Thankfully, Denis Levaillant's latest show dispels that fear. Piano Circus is a fable of the pianist, the pianist grappling with his repertoire. Grappling with his anxieties (damaging his fingers), with his fears (playing worse than with his feet). All that in order to create, in his own way, an illusion, some magic: make sounds appear, organized and complicated, playing with the pedals, taking advantage of the spectators' auditory perception, in complicity with the composer. All this fairly subtle matter is the framework of Piano Circus, a familiar framework for Denis Levaillant who has always spoken of his piano, his gods (Liszt with his octaves and arpeggios) and his sequence of movements. A framework he manages to express musically very well, on the one hand with his knowledge of electroacoustic, for making an effect suddenly appear from a loudspeaker at the precise second, perfectly amplified, and, on the other hand, with the music he interprets. And that is the show's primary asset. For there are two ways of approaching the pianist's inner thoughts. The laughable way, that of Bernard Haller ("this piano: a pan for spuds!"), or else the musical way, by Denis Levaillant. No "extract of Beethoven" or "Chopin juice", but personal compositions verging on Conlon Nancarrow with their rapid delivery, with a few temptations at seduction (e.g., a passage à la Keith Jarrett, full of irony). It takes some daring to give us music like this, an uncompromising flow of notes.

Christian Leblé

Straightaway, the obvious fact: Denis Levaillant is a creator. From a good old piano, he draws things that are personal to him while anchoring them deeply in a history, a continuity with an art of possession, unheard-of sensuality and an extraordinary pianistic gesture.
Denis Levaillant caresses the piano, curls up in its sonorities, superb undulations or soft aggressions. His 12 movements for solo piano are so many bursts of music, each built on one idea. Resonance studies in the hollow of the sound. Preludes open onto infinity, sculpted in full matter. And always this art of possession that borders on the narcissistic.

Poetry for the year 2000
Change of style. Piano and piano. One "live", the other manipulated on tape by computer. Confrontation again narcissistic and appropriation. Still this touch of the mirror-instrument, which transports the least informed listener. Subtle correspondences, with a spatialization of sounds. Brainwaves, like these peeping high notes in the two pianos. Resonances, a dynamic, sound clusters, poetry for the year 2000.
Change of style. It's incredible the way Denis Levaillant appropriates the best of what exists. From jazz, this time: Charlie Parker and lots of others, bent to his will. Although, in Piano Transit, the necessary co-ordination between the machine - by that I mean the tape running at a determined speed - and the instrument played live limits the performer's freedom, the following piece could last for eternity in the wake of jazz - for Denis Levaillant changes music like clothes, the artist letting his imagination wander and blossom.
Possession of music. Possession of self and others. Possession of creation. The art of possession.

Christian Goubault

Review in LE MONDE DE LA MUSIQUE - november 1986

In a rather daring staging by Christian Colin, Denis Levaillant (piano), Brigitte Vinson (mezzo-soprano) and the Ami Flammer Quartet offer a long reverie that is sometimes sublime, often disturbing. This is a very arid journey, for the particular diction and density of these short works glitter with extreme penetration. These pages, where the sonority becomes thinner, give way to radical, impersonal, archaic power. Liszt experimented with pure rhythm, monody and the collapse of all consonant stability. Implicitly, almost clandestinely, the range of nuances remains the final ruins of a heretofore grandiose rhetoric and an infinitely more argumentative tone.
Denis Levaillant's approach is one of rare pianistic mastery. His greatest merit is to make us, in the space of a journey, look straight in the face the extraordinary light that suddenly appears from a nothingness that Liszt, more than anyone else, fought against.

Patrick Szersnovicz

Le Baigneur

Opéra-bouffe sur un texte de Maurice Roche - 1976
Pour un chanteur, violoncelle solo, orchestre de chambre (cl + clb, sax S +T, 2 tp, tb, cor, tuba, 2 percs, alto, vlc, cb), quintette vocal (ssabb) et electroacoustique, 25'
Dédié à: Michel Hermon.

Création: le 20 janvier 1982 au Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, par Michel Hermon, David Simpson et les solistes de l'Ensemble Musique Vivante sous la direction de Philippe Nahon.

Premier enregistrement: Delétré, Simpson, Nahon, CD Thésis THC82054.

Editeur: Durand et Cézame-Argile.

Piano check-up 1978

Spectacle musical pour un pianiste, un acteur et un saxophoniste - 60'.

Création: le compositeur en collaboration avec Laurent Fachard et Pierre Rigaud, Lucernaire, Paris.

Nouvelle version en duo avec un magicien, Abdul Alafrez , 1982.

LE MATIN - février 1983

Retour au théâtre de la cruauté.

Deux pièces à louer de Denis Levaillant a fait le plein à l'auditorium du musée d'Art moderne de Paris. Un succès trop rare de théâtre musical pour ne pas être salué.
Que fait, qu'éprouve un pianiste servant d'accompagnateur (et de double) à un illusionniste magicien ? Que fait, qu'imagine un chanteur dans le lieu clos d'une salle de bain, à la surface carrelée et réverbérante ? Ce sont là les thèmes des deux sketches (Piano check-up, Le Baigneur) qui, à coups de gags, composent cette action-partition. Théâtre et musique trouvent ici un assez bel équilibre. Les trois personnages principaux occupent remarquablement l'espace (Denis Levaillant lui-même au piano, Abdul Alafrez en illusionniste, Michel Hermon en chanteur) ; un véritable dialogue s'instaure entre les partenaires sur scène et une bande-son finement ciselée.

Brigitte Massin

OUEST FRANCE - July 1983

Levaillant's multidimensional sound space through the frenzies of a sound-effects man
Inside was unquestionably the most disconcerting contemporary premiere of the weekend. Thoroughly original in its form, Denis Levaillant's composition for sound-effects man, cello, trumpet and tape gives birth to a new genre, combining theatre with music. A sort of modern theatre in which the actor takes on the role of sound-effects man. The chronology opens on a set that could be the traditional framework of a hotel room, in which arrives, loaded down with two valises, the runaway (Louis Amiel), a pathetic sound-effects man who is desperately trying to give up the name of stand-in. This is therefore no longer an operational sound-effects man, but a man whose fantasies come from his trade.
We then enter into the delirium of a character who has spent his entire life making noise for others. Jammed behind the curtain in the wings, he imagines stories that accentuate the sound space of the whole hall. Therein lies the magical power of the sound-effects man who can artificially recreate all sorts of situations, even the most terrible. But if, today, noise and musical sound are side by side, the presence of musicians, even disguised, is no less indispensable onstage. Music cannot be rigged, poor sound-effects man...

A.V.

LES SAISONS DE LA DANSE

To put together his story, dancer-choreographer Dominique Petit chose the theme of America, urban, noisy and sprawling but also the land of wide-open spaces, symbol of freedom and adventure. With pianist-actor Denis Levaillant, he relates "the nocturnal confessions of two dreamy rascals. The blues of gold diggers". Both invent cock-and-bull stories and answer each other, one with gestures, the other with music, which he combines with surprising sound effects. Decked out in a shiny blue suit and silver shoes, Dominique Petit plays the ladies'man, gangster, rock'n'roller, music-hall artiste who tap dances to a strange music mixing bird cries, the whistling of a train and the noise of a pinball machine.
This modern tale, expressed through American mythology is also an excellent choreographic pretext. The dancer practices all forms of walking and discovers all the combinations of movement by putting together the most unexpected steps. He experiments with effects of speed and stopping, and mixes karate positions with pliés and ronds de jambe from classical dance and the acrobatics of a gymnast. Here is a muscular, energetic creation, original in its method and captivating because it makes the dancer and musician participate in an amazing duo.

Véronique Sédro

THE ARRANGER ARRANGED*

LE MONDE - February 17t, 1981

Hearing Caroline Gautier recite Lenau's ballad Der traurige Mönch or one by Bürger with such total commitment, so far from this tongue-in-cheek approach resorted to by those who dare not let themselves go to romantic excesses, receiving Denis Levaillant's piano commentary headlong, sometimes between two phrases, sometimes beneath a few verses, sometimes developed, sometimes reduced to a few notes, one had the impression of being carried back to the 19th century, in the chiaroscuro of a friendly drawing room with the composer improvising at the piano. The whole piano part is written out, yet it does not seem to be: there are few developments but, to the contrary, a succession of dramatic gestures that are always evocative. The recitation, on the other hand, is not fixed, and it is to the credit of Caroline Gautier, trained as a singer, who is able to model her voice, sometimes modeling inflexions on the melody of the accompaniment, so that the poem remains basically understandable despite the language barrier (a summary is given beforehand), thanks to the straightforward contours of the vocal line.
This "musical voyage starting from Franz Liszt" ends with an excerpt from the Weinen, Klagen Variations on the Bach theme, as he had begun with an arrangement of Sunt lacrimae rerum. The arranger being arranged, one might say, but this evocation, of which Michel Hermon realized what he calls "putting into images", given the crampedness of the stage, but which could indeed be a musical staging (the pianist as full-fledged actor), so skillfully avoids pretension and attests to such obvious involvement on the part of the performers within the morbid, impassioned Romantic universe, which they strive to bring back to life, that the show and the intellectual aim disappear behind the new-found spirit.

Gérard Condé

*Translator's note: a reference to the French film L'arroseur arrosé (Louis Lumière, 1895), which featured the first gag in the history of cinema.

LIBÉRATION - January 26th, 1978

I remained dumbfounded, surprised and happy to hear and see a musical show of a kind all too rare.
The music is magic, a note, a melody, and the head plunges to forget the previous instant under the bloody freezing rain. Denis Levaillant at the piano and Pierre Rigaud on saxophone make us hear magic by showing it to us: their duo is accompanied by a lovely lady and a handsome gentleman who, like at the circus, produce ping-pong balls from their mouths without our knowing how in the world they were able to store up a dozen of them. They juggle, catch, throw, miss and bow, and their show is music, which goes with the piano and sax! The falling ping-pong ball will mark the rhythm. Sometimes it even bounces hard on the piano strings, adding to the notes. This is not a matter of music on one side and jugglers and magicians on the other. We are listening to music of gestures and sound. The theatrical space becomes musical.
Denis Levaillant, the composer of most of these duos, trails us around in a sound universe that brings to mind pianist Paul Bley, with its atmosphere that is at once classical, rigorous and utterly mad. Yet their duo always carries us into thoroughly original creations that are theirs alone. A final word: laughter is permanent, heaving, like a musical counterpoint sent by the spectators, and seeing people who do not take themselves seriously gives one even more freedom for letting go.

Philippe Conrath