Chimères… Improvisation sur René Char is an homage to the French poet René Char. The work draws on the final verse of Le visage nuptial, the longest poem in Seuls demeurent, a collection written across the years surrounding the Second World War and published in 1945. The verse recalls a fleeting moment of happiness and love associated with Greta Knutson in the summer of 1938, before the violence of war and Char’s engagement in the Resistance.

The phonetic and symbolic richness of Char’s words generates the structure and musical flow. The opening word, chimères, is progressively decomposed into breath, nasal resonance, closed-mouth vibration and vowel colour. From this initial respiration, mezzo-soprano and B-flat clarinet gradually establish a dialogue through whispers, fricatives, multiphonics, instrumental air and improvisatory processes, allowing individual fragments of language to become musical material.

The trajectory moves from respiration towards word and sound, before progressively dissolving again into air. At the end, an almost silent breath evokes both the shared respiration of the lovers and an intimacy already shadowed by the death and violence to come. The work thus follows an improvisatory flow generated from Char’s language, extending its poetic tension from the emergence of sound to its disappearance.