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Two hundred and seventy schoolchildren on the stage of the Philharmonie of Paris, in a resolutely green context : it is the choral group of Zerballodu, the ecological tale by Alexandre Lévy and Gérard Poli welcoming young and old alike for the performance this Saturday morning at eleven o’clock. Zerballodu was commissioned by the Orchestre National d’Île-de-France as part of its annual participatory project, « Chantons et jouons avec l’orchestre » ( Let’s sing and play with orchestra). The musical adventure is far-reaching and the energy of the participants is phenomenal. On the voice side, the students have been working since October 2018 with their respective teachers, then with the choir director Sophie Boucheron and the conductor Léo Warynski. On the instrument side, some thirty young musicians from eleven
conservatories in the Île-de-France region have been selected to live this experience alongside their elders, the very involved members of ONDIF. Conceived with four hands by composer Alexandre Lévy and his accomplice, librettist Gérard Poli, Zerballodu talks to us about ecology, nature conservation and the danger of deforestation in the Amazon through the universe of storytelling and the springs of the marvelous. Thus begins a struggle between the Trees, embodied by some 235 choristers (two choirs with equal voices, all dressed in white) placed on the backstage rows, and the Helmets, thirsty-five guys with low voices and in overalls, galvanized by their site manager (« Let’s go, guys !») and the military drum. Two professional singers share the stage with them : the soprano Raquel Camarinha, moving from one camp to the other according to the roles she assumes ; as for the baritone Julien Clément, half-man, half-tree, with his bush in his head, he is the Shaman supposed to link the spirit of men and the forces of nature. “Beware of Zerballodu, the monster that rumbles on our thresholds » : the tale written by Gérard Poli is a long poem with a sonorous and playful language (« shear me off all this wood ! ») which Alexandre Lévy takes up : impossible, of course, in the reverberant acoustics of the Philharmonie, to grasp its subtleties, even if the spoken scenes are more explicit. But the repetitive manner in which the text adopts and the rhythmic veins given by the music distill the substantial sound marrow from it.
Fantasy, humor and invention are at work in a score as abundant as it is demanding, where the composer often makes the different sound sources, choral, orchestral and electroacoustic, interact in a very subtle mix : like the first page (the sounds of the forest) where the noisy interventions of the « Trees » and a few colored touches of the percussions blend into the « sound landscape » heard through the loudspeakers. Next to Léo Warynski, the choir director Sophie Boucheron watches over the grain. As in Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, whose echoes can be heard here and there, contrasts are created between the different scenes, to sharpen an attention that never lets up : thus these catchy sounds, entrusted to the double choir and finely orchestrated, which take us into the world of musical comedy in the best possible vein. Or even that funny scene with its muscular chorus, where Raquel Camarinha very lively and in a very attractive «open air », inventories the contents of her freeze-dried food cart that the helmets are feasting on. Comical, certainly, and very well taken on, the « war scream » of the latter (« yes chef ! »), with a bluffing synergistic effect, is no less disturbing. The yellow helmets and blue vests are functional, with Édouard Signolet’s staging and Tristan Mouget’s lights making full use of the space deployed around the orchestra. The revelations of The Shaman

(Julien Clément with a generous baritone) give rise to more tense episodes where the luxuriant orchestra, enhanced by a large percussion desk, effectively serves the dramaturgy.
Supported by Sophie Boucheron, Léo Warynsky impresses us with the beautiful authority of his direction and fluidity he obtains within the forces at work. We are moved by the exemplary attire and commitment of the young participants, most of whom have never before been outside the door of a theatre.