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Born in 1990 in northern France, composer Camille Pépin has been hailed as a fresh, exciting voice in the world of contemporary classical music. Orchestras worldwide, including the National Orchestra of France, the BBC Symphony and the Toronto Symphony, have performed her colorful, evocative compositions, which she describes as standing “at the crossroads of French impressionism and American contemporary music.” ‘
Pépin’s mesmering Les eaux célèstes (Celestial Waters) takes its inspiration from the fluid beauty of water and the vastness of the cosmos, as ethereal melodies transport listeners to another world. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform the work in concerts Sept. 25-28 under Mikko Franck.
Written in 2023, Les eaux célestes was inspired by an ancient Chinese legend adopted into Japanese folklore in the eighth century. Its two main characters are Orihime, a sky god’s daughter, who weaves clothing from clouds, and Hikoboshi, a youth herding cows among the stars.
The young lovers neglect their important tasks until the sky god places “a great celestial river” — the Milky Way — between them. The princess’ bitter tears “create small pearls of light in the sky.” The sun god, subsequently moved, allows them to meet once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, but they cannot cross the gulf separating them. Finally, flocks of birds create a bridge with their wings, and the lovers are reunited.
In a review of Pépin’s Violin Concerto, Limelight magazine compares her work to the French impressionists: "Oone can certainly hear hints of Debussy and Ravel — the rippling woodwinds in the third movement and the hazy pastel harmonies of the concerto’s opening.
“But there is also the huge influence that Pépin finds in nature, in walking through a landscape, and we sense this is the springlike renewal of the penultimate section, ”The Phoenix,“ with the violin weaving joyfully over primal colors and rhythms worthy of Copland.”
In a review of the first disc devoted to Pépin’s works, Crescendo magazine wrote: "The music of the French creator has fermented in a brew of multiple influences, not all of which — this is already a sign of great art — are immediately identifiable. While her postmodern aesthetic is undoubtedly an extension of those of Guillaume Connesson and Thierry Escaich, with whom she studied, the primordial role that she attributes to rhythm leads some to see a nod to a composer such as Steve Reich, another of her models.
"Rightly so, no doubt, because Pépin makes no secret of the fact that she has a real affection for the music of the American composer. The rhythms that irrigate her works have this in common with those that characterize Reich’s music: they imbue each piece with an implacable, almost convulsive movement, which propels them irremediably toward the end."
