The desire to create this orchestra stems from research originally conducted by the La Vie Brève theatre company on ‘how to watch music’ and therefore also ‘how to listen to theatre’.

We want to put together a rather unusual ensemble that stems directly from this work. The orchestra will be made up of musicians from the worlds of classical music, early music (playing period instruments such as the theorbo and viola da gamba) and improvised music.

Contre piano et contre orchestre. An opposition as much as a rapprochement, just as one can be against or completely for something. An experiment led by Samuel Achache, director and musician, Eve Risser, Antonin Tri Hoang and Florent Hubert.
The orchestra will explore the concertante form note by note, starting with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s (1714-1788) Concerto Wq 43/4 for keyboard. This piece by Johann Sebastian Bach’s youngest son, composed in 1772 and part of his series of Hamburg concertos, works of maturity, completes his mastery of the genre while disrupting it with certain new experiments. The torch of research is now in the hands of the La Sourde orchestra, a collective that blends jazz and classical music, modern and period instruments, composed of musicians who accompany Samuel Achache’s work throughout his shows.
This joyful band is engaged in a long-term project, ‘listening to theatre and watching music’, always groping for new points of connection where the work and the instrumentalist confront each other and find each other in music, but also in words, thoughts, linguistic advances… The orchestra moves and C. P. E. Bach’s music shifts; we watch it turn, we listen to it transform over the course of four movements. Hidden doors at the margins of the texts and scores then open on stage, revealing to the audience the richness of uncharted territories.