If and Only If

Igor Stravinsky composed Elegy for Viola in 1994 “so that Germain Prévost could play it in memory of Alphonse Onnou, founder of the Pro Arte Quartet”. Tribute and lament, the piece is played here by Gérard Caussé, assisted, if one can say so, by a garden banded snail. Riding the bow, the gastropod goes from the bottom to the top of the stick during the music. The title, which is a logic expression that imposes a double condition simultaneously, points to the link between animal and human, between music and silence, between seeing and listening, between two astonishments, two sliding virtuosities.