Title: Je suis Orage Composer : Bastien David
Note of intent:
Je suis Orage is a concerto for three pianists and two percussionists playing on a single piano, accompanied by an ensemble of musicians. For this creation, three generations of winners of the Orléans International Piano Competition are brought together around the keyboard. Accepting the unacceptable and dying a slow death. The piece expresses the energy of a liberation, of breaking through the conflicts that inhabit us through awareness and the desire to live. Like the expression of a no that thunders in the depths of the soul and allows for something else. This storm to see the rain return, fertile. This score is the prelude to an evening that will take place in autumn 2026 at the Cité de la musique.
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Biography:
Bastien DAVID is a composer passionate about the diversity of the living world, with his inspiration fundamentally drawn from the sensory relationships that sounds weave between themselves and their ability to move through time and space. Winner 2025 of the Fondation Ernst von Siemens, of the Hervé Dugardin Prize and the Banque Populaire Foundation award, he was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome where he completed the invention of his 12th-tone Metallophone. “Les Métamorphoses,” the first work for this new instrument, premiered in 2022 at the Radio France Auditorium. Since then, this piece has been regularly featured at national venues, festivals, and heritage sites.
A student of Bernard Cavanna and José Manuel Lopez Lopez, Bastien entered the CNSM in Gérard Pesson’s class. There began a period of significant encounters during which he composed “Riff” for Marie Ythier at the Messiaen Festival, “Phaidra” for Fanny Ardant at the BFM in Geneva, then “Bec et Ongles,” commissioned by Renaud Capuçon for the Nouveaux Horizons Festival in Aix en Provence. His collaboration with Éditions Henry Lemoine has been decisive in his career.
A lasting relationship was established with the Ensemble intercontemporain, leading to commissions in 2020 of “Urban song” at the Présences Festival and “Solo” at the Festival Numérique du Châtelet, in 2023 “Chlorophyll Synthesis,” composed during his residency in Germany at Villa Concordia, and in 2024, “Bec et Ongles suspended” at IRCAM and “Je suis Orage” at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, written during his residency at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid.
Each piece presents an opportunity for exciting human adventures with magnificent performers and ensembles such as the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, Orchestre d’Auvergne, TM+, L’Instant Donné, Court-circuit, 2e2m, la Main Harmonique, Geneva Camerata Orchestra, Zafraan-ensemble, and the Diotima and Tchalik Quartets. His works are performed in concerts worldwide, in Germany, Argentina, England, Spain, China, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Monaco, and Switzerland. Recently, 285,000 visitors discovered “Sensitive”, the participatory orchestral sculpture he presented at the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, and which he will continue to develop over time. www.lesinsectes.fr.
Bastien was invited to the IMPULS Festival in 2017 at the Bauhaus in Dessau, a festival that today is jeopardized.
Art in all its forms enables us to understand the very essence of what life could be. It also enables us to develop our capacity to imagine. A capacity that seems essential if the Earth is still to be habitable in a few years’ time.
