Chants d'Est is a journey. This performance was born out of cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton's desire to bring together the music of that Eastern Europe she favors - brought together in the disc Chants d'Est, released in early 2009 from Naïve - and the texts of great writers read by the velvety, deep voice of Fanny Ardant.

The premiere of Chants d'Est took place in December 2009 at the Chapiteau Romanès in Paris. Three evenings in which the musician and actress, accompanied by the musicians of Ensemble Niguna transported the
marquee audience like gypsies to a universe outside of time, crossing borders, crossing them like the Danube.

Program
- My Puskin, excerpt (Marina Cvetaeva)
S.Rachmaninov Vespers Op. 37
- Diaries (1915), excerpt (F. Kafka)
E.Dohnany Ruralia Hungarica
Andante rubato, alla zingaresca - presto
Traditional Jewish Song in Memory of Schubert
to . Tcherepnine Tartar Dance
B.Bartok Four Duo - excerpts from Mikrokosmos for oboe and cello
F.Krawczyk Seven childhood games to the melodies of Janacek's poems:
Childhood Game 1

- to P. E. (1914), excerpt (Marina Cvetaeva)
Childhood play 2 and 3

- The Burning Soul (1916), excerpt (Marina Cvetaeva)
Childhood Play 4 and 5

- Attempt at Jealousy (1924), excerpt (Marina Cvetaeva)

- The Soul on Fire (1917), excerpt (Marina Cvetaeva)
Childhood Play 6

- The Burning Soul (1913), excerpt (Marina Cvetaeva)
Childhood Play 7

- TheBurning Soul (1913), excerpt (Marina Cvetaeva)
S.Prokofiev The Field of the Fallen
B.Martinu Variations on a Slavic Theme

- Duine Elegies - The First Elegy, excerpt (R. M. Rilke)
Malher I was lost to the world

Mitteleuropa, center of Europe, crossroads where different cultures mingle. Under its protective wing, oppressive and fascinating at the same time, the great Austro-Hungarian empire groups cultures struggling against the loss of their identity. This resistance comes through the love of the forbidden mother tongue. Listening to it, the incessant study of folklore themes, characterize the very special universe of composers like Janácek, Mahler or Martinu. To interpret them is first to work on their relationship to language.
More to East, it becomes a story of transmission. The music says what is impossible to describe. Among all the regimes across Russia, there is terror but also, beyond it, a force that to times implodes, to times explodes. What is said is said for all those who do not have the word. Drawn from this double resistance -- one for the memory of one's own language, the other to tell what is forbidden -- magnetized from this place in the world from where I come from, tirelessly, I listened again to the works I knew and loved, discovered others, written for voice, choir, violin, orchestra, piano. I appealed to Franck Krawczyk to help me to find a way among them, where, as in the case of Janácek, he finds inspiration. And I made the choice of an orchestra to strings to find the depth, the tension in Rachmaninov's Vêpres and the intensity in Prokofiev's Alexandre Nevsky, and to explode
the virtuosity of the dances and the very rhythmic pieces. Thus, the path we will follow will take us from a tragic song to a lullaby, from a lied that tells of a dream to a dance with gypsy accents, as if we let ourselves be led between chapters of the same tale.
SoniaWieder-Atherton

Russia's infinite power of attraction. better than Gogol's troika, what allows one to experience it is the image of a great river extending to as far as the eye can see its yellow waters sending waves everywhere, of the high waves, but without excess. On the banks, wild and desolate lands, broken blades of grass.
Franz Kafka

Musical life to Budapest today can be summed up in one name: Dohnányi. [...] Often, after the
concert, he has to walk back at least an hour in the rain and snow!
BélaBartók

For the folk composer, the musical sound is nothing but this refined sound that comes out of the instrument; it is distorted by noises, wet with living water or the Danube, green with woods [...], it stretches its arms toward the stars.
Leoš Janácek

My music is Czech, which nobody can deny, right?
Bohuslav Martinu

The Danube: it is the river along which different peoples meet, cross and mingle. It is the river of Vienna and Bratislava, of Budapest, of Belgrade; it is the ribbon that crosses and encircles Habsburg Austria, whose mythology and ideology made it the symbol of a plural and supra-national koïnè, this empire whose sovereigns addressed "my peoples" and whose anthem was sung in eleven languages. The Danube is the Germanomagiarian-Slavic-Judeo-Roman Mitteleurope, a world "behind the nations."
"Danube," Claudio Magris

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