These two songs are about the notion of Heaven. The first, based on a poem by Baptiste-Marrey, is a sort of questioning about the figure of the Angel, its mystery and duality: 'Angel of Life, Angel of Death...' Thus, the whole piece rests on particularly canonic writing, including numerous echo effects and very dense polyphonic writing in which various parts of the text are superposed. As for the second, on a poem by Claude Vigée, it takes on the appearance of a nervous dance in which rhythms of the Renaissance come to mix with harmonic colours drawn from even earlier music in order to stage this race outside itself towards the image of a sun representing the Awakening.
Thierry Escaich
Translated by John Tyler Tuttle