Ma P'tite Chanson

The lyric singer Agathe Peyrat and the accordionist Pierre Cussac like to travel between different musical horizons. Trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, these two musicians with atypical backgrounds, both used to opera stages and jazz festivals, have come together for a project dedicated to song. From Anne Sylvestre to Liza Minelli, including Maurice Yvain, Brigitte Fontaine, Radiohead, the Beatles or Tom Waits, they revisit the voice-accordion duo in an intimate and generous concert.

Agathe Peyrat and Pierre Cussac have undertaken a veritable balancing act. 

Evolving on a suspended bridge between classical and pop music, these two jacks-of-all-trades explore the plasticity of the voice-accordion duet in its most unexpected detours, making an orchestra appear in an eggshell. 

Mechanics of intimacy, appeal to memory and imagination. As one would unfold an animated book, they reach out to the spectator. They open the doors to a miniature world and invite the audience to travel to the very heart of the song. Exploring the repertoire with inventiveness, playing with forms as one handles colours, they have fun highlighting melodies tinged with jazz, cabaret, French song and international variety in arrangements that never quite go where you think they will. 

It is with a certain taste for disguise that the songs of Tom Waits or Bourvil are taken up by the soprano voice, the ukulele interferes with a Radiohead hit and the accordion takes up a few Beatles lines. A way of shedding new light on texts, of reappropriating lyrics beyond genres and preconceptions... In other words, a way of having fun.

October 2021