Cécile McLorin Salvant

Welcome to the 19th edition of Klarafestival! The theme Crossroads - Come Together keenly evokes the convergence of the audience, the artists and their inspiring concerts. A meeting place where the leading lights of international classical music enter into dialogue with challenging creations and young talent. 

The inspiration for this edition comes from festival artist Claron McFadden. As she told us in an interview, “I stand at a crossroads where styles and generations cross, meet, and collide”. This notion forms the core of the programme. We hope you will enjoy Klarafestival as a sanctuary of hope, polyphony and beauty in all its forms. As a place where the familiar takes on new meaning and where new experiences take you by surprise. 

Jan Raes, chairman

Joost Fonteyne, intendant

Chantal Pattyn, manager Klara

For the production Ogresse, the singer and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant draws on the fairytale tradition of ogres and ogresses, giant mythological beings who eat human beings, preferably children. In the French fairytales by the 17th-century author Charles Perrault, the way to defeat an ogre is always to deceive it, which often leads to the ogre’s death. Ogresse expands upon these typical narrative elements: a villager who is cunning rather than strong comes up with a plan to impress his fellow villagers. His plan is to seduce the female ogre who lives in the forest, gain her trust and then kill her. Although she does not believe his advances to begin with, she is gradually persuaded that the man really finds her attractive. In turn, the man’s feelings become genuine as he gets to know her. Just as he is about to throw the dagger he was going to kill her with into the river, putting a definitive end to his murder plans, she catches him with the weapon in his hand and realises what his intentions had been. Her distrust and inability to believe in his interest are justified, and he knows he will not be able to convince her that his intentions have changed. Overwhelmed by feelings of betrayal and self-reproach, she triggers the lightning-fast tragedy that ends the tale.

As she did in her most recent album Mélusine, Salvant portrays a woman who is different. She is struggling with the question of whether anyone can love her and whether she can trust that person. In Ogresse, Salvant explores the complexity of a demonised figure and gives her a backstory that partly explains her violent behaviour: a traumatic experience with a stepfather fills her with a hunger that she tries to sate with human flesh. It is as though she hears a voice telling her what to do. The villagers on the edge of the forest where she lives avoid her and see her as a threat.

In an interview with the jazz specialist Richard Scheinin, Salvant cites four sources of inspiration for Ogresse that demonstrate the breadth of her musical and cultural frame of reference. Salvant sees a first musical link with the French baroque cantata, which had its glory days in the early decades of the eighteenth century and lost its significance when opera regained popularity in France. Both the hybrid format of the baroque cantata, with recitative passages and airs, and its mythological, allegorical character, are echoed in Ogresse. 

Jelly Roll Morton’s 1938 recording of Murder Ballad is her second musical connection. Salvant herself performed this raw and explicit piece – which stems from a long tradition of murder songs – in 2017: a courageous choice, even for someone who loves delving into the archives of jazz and related genres. Ogresse and Morton’s performance share a focus on the story of a murderess and the rapid alternation between the different characters’ perspectives. Both pieces are centred on a woman who murders someone when she finds out that her beloved has betrayed her. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible not to sympathise with both figures. The raw, confessional aspect of Murder Ballad is replaced with the fairytale context of a narrator who mentions the horrors of the ogress’ deeds in passing, bringing the story closer to the versions by early modern authors of fairytales than the expurgated adaptations fed to children today. 

These two musical references – the cantata and Murder Ballad – are miles apart at first glance. However, a closer look reveals significant common ground: the extensive tale is told by a single voice. In combination with Salvant’s interest in the theatrical roots of jazz and concern for themes such as ecology, discrimination and dehumanisation, the result is an extraordinary, dark song cycle that fluctuates back and forth between styles and historical references, although the whole thing feels highly contemporary. The liberties she takes with genres and the rapid switches between them that permeate Ogresse are also in evidence in Salvant’s albums. She works like a curator, combining refreshing interpretations of familiar and less familiar jazz standards with her own compositions, tunes from Broadway musicals and the occasional foray into pop.

The third and fourth references that Salvant names focus on the representation of Black women. One is a painting by the artist Gerard Fortune, depicting the Haïtian Voodoo goddess Erzulie in nature. The other is the life of the South African Sarah (or Saartjie) Baartman, who was ‘exhibited’ in Europe in a fetishisation of her curvaceous figure. The link with Baartman is clearest in the villagers’ plans to exhibit the ogress (whose skin is described as ‘chocolate brown’) in a cage. From this final perspective, the fable reads like a criticism of othering and the exploitation of the Black female body. This is the dimension strongly suggested in the animated film of Ogresse that Salvant worked on as an illustrator and director, in collaboration with the Belgian filmmaker Lia Bertels.

The instrumental ensemble is made up of carefully selected, leading musicians from the world of jazz and a string quartet with a background in contemporary classical music. Salvant has found the ideal partner to arrange the work and act as the musical director of the ensemble in the Canadian arranger and conductor Darcy James Argue. Cécile McLorin Salvant, the extremely versatile vocal artist who won three Grammys for best vocal jazz album before her thirtieth birthday, wrote the music and lyrics herself. Ogresse offers her a playground in which to showcase her technical vocal abilities and her empathic ability to bring characters to life. They range from a narrator who introduces the story as if it were a fairytale to a naïve girl who wants to explore the forest, and from the hypocritical lover who has a change of heart to the lonely ogress herself. Salvant switches effortlessly between the characters who populate her fantastical world, enabling us to feel compassion with all the characters in a tale that fizzes with originality.

Eva Van Daele, translated by Helen White

Cécile McLorin Salvant

Cécile McLorin Salvant is an American composer, singer and visual artist. In her work she combines theatrical elements with various music genres, including vaudeville, jazz, baroque, blues and folk music. She is always looking for forgotten songs that tell stories with unexpected twists and a comic tone. After studying classical and baroque singing, she made her breakthrough as a jazz singer when she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2010. Since then, she has released seven solo albums, in which she combines idiosyncratic selections of jazz standards with her own creations. She won Grammy Awards for three consecutive albums in 2016, 2018 and 2019.

Darcy James Argue
Darcy James Argue is a Canadian jazz pianist, arranger and composer. He is best known as the leader of the 18-piece big band Secret Society, a self-declared 'anachronistic' ensemble that combines historical jazz with a contemporary sound. Their album Real Enemies (2016) was considered one of the best 20 albums of the decade by Stereogum. Argue has created work commissioned by numerous ensembles, such as the Danish Radio Big Band, Canadian National Jazz Orchestra, Hard Rubber Orchestra, Jazz Knights and Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos. His work is supported by institutions such as New Music USA, Composers Now, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

The concert is accompanied by new visuals created by Lia Bertels and animated by Lora D'Addazio, Julien Regnard and Mathilde Rémy, as part of the adaptation of Ogresse into an animated feature film by Cécile McLorin Salvant & Lia Bertels (Miyu productions, Umedia and Ogresse LLC).