Musique & Cinéma : The Experience and Energy of Bruno Pelletier and Guy St-Onge

 

 

MUSIC.  “I remember reading somewhere that a good score is one that you don’t hear.  The score can enhance a transition and then disappear to enhance a phrase.  There’s a particular emotive power in scores,” says Guy St-Onge, composer.

 

It’s during a symphonic tour for Notre-Dame de Paris, around four years ago, that Bruno Pelletier and Guy St-Ong discovered a shared affinity.

 

 “Bruno talked about cinema and the fact that he listened to film soundtracks.  When I make music, I always have many images in my head.  We told each other that we should do a project together.  It happened naturally,” Guy St-Onge tells us.

 

That’s how, gradually, the project “Music et cinéma” was born, and then the album.

 

The idea behind this project was to create a new cover for noteworthy songs from movies and to make them into piano-voice versions.  The pieces were given new impetus in symphonic arrangements.

 

One can find a dozen songs on the album, such as Calling You (Bagdad Café), Your Song (Moulin Rouge), Le coeur est un oiseau (Le Party), Ordinaire (Gabrielle) and The Long and Winding Road (Let It Be).

 

 “When recording in the form of piano-voice, you go into a bubble.  We followed each other and we knitted around emotion.  We got rid of songs when we weren’t completely at ease. (…) In pop music with a symphonic orchestra, there is a real danger: that the voice and the orchestra are disconnected,” Bruno Pelletier explains.

 

My goal was to create detailed arrangements to enhance this bubble that went out again from our piano-voice recordings.  We needed to find a way to do the same and to push certain strong moments without the orchestra dominating everything and flattening the piano-voice part,” Guy St-Onge clarifies.

 

Experience and Energy

 

Bruno Pelletier and Guy St-Onge are of the same mind : it’s a project they couldn’t have done 20 or 30 years ago.

 

I couldn’t have done it 30 years ago.  I didn’t have, at the time, the musical color palette that I have today,” the composer stresses.

 

 “It’s an album of our image, meaning it’s full of experience and energy,” Bruno Pelletier adds.

 

 “It’s a slow listening album, but it wasn’t selected in terms of emotions.  It’s a free album,” Guy St-Onge notes.

 

In concert!

 

The duo will present the songs from this new album at the Théâtre du Cégep de Trois-Rivières on October 10th.  Other songs taken from films and reworked will also be performed.

 

“Already, two orchestras have contacted us to look into the possibility of doing a symphonic version in concert.  It’s in our plans for later in 2015,” Bruno Pelletier concludes.

 

 

Translated by Ashlee R. Estep