Alice Julien-Laferrière and the musicians of Ensemble Artifices invite you to plunge into the abundant and delightful evocation of water, an inexhaustible source of inspiration in French Baroque music, where the ornaments represent the ripples of streams, where no opera is without storms and thunderstorms, and where the river becomes the confidante of lovers... music in which the evocation of nature is a constant gush.

At the heart of this literary concert, in a setting of aquatic evocations, the Fables of the aptly-named Jean de La Fontaine, set to music in the 18th century, are sung to well-known tunes of the time.

The son of a Master of Water and Forests, and then a Master himself, Jean de La Fontaine put words on the air, in all their states: closed canal, stream, pond, marsh, spring, fountain, torrent, river, sea... Everything muffles, stagnates, trickles, gushes, splashes, leaps, shimmers, sparkles, whispers, sings, roars...
In the Fables chosen for this literary concert, water has a thousand faces: it shelters, welcomes, waters, nourishes, tempts; but it can also abuse, carry away, deceive, imprison and even kill... Sometimes it reflects and reveals...
At a time when our suffering planet is catching fire, drying up or drowning, the words of La Fontaine and the waves of music that mingle with them remain for us, the listeners, a resource of life and enchantment.

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