Beirut
Vincent Peirani

The way fans talk about their favourite band sometimes is worth more than biographies, statistics and numbers of streams or followers on social medial. The relationship of Beirut’s leader, the American composer and multi-instrumentalist Zach Condon, with his audience is rather close to the one the cult artists in different times used to have with people whose lives became slowly as one with the music. About four years ago, Zach Condon announced that he could not participate in a tour to promote the album which had just been launched because of health reasons. It is an understatement to say that their comeback with an album and a tour is an event: arising from a collaboration with the producer Viktoria Dalborg, also the director of the Swedish circus Kompani Giraff, A Study of Losses talks about mourning and fragility of life through a warm blend of sounds: folk, Renaissance music, electro, pop and film music. A high fineness and a remarkable demonstration of Beirut’s art of telling stories: their stories, the ones of others and yours too.

Such as an alchemist, Vincent Peirani has been busy in his musical lab for 15 years, with his quintet: Tony Paeleman (keyboards, piano), Emile Parisien (soprano saxophone), Julien Herné (bass) and Yoann Serra (drums). This ensemble produces an explosion of sounds, melodies and beats, inspired by pop and baroque music as well as jazz, of course, from Africa and the Balkans. With its last project Living Being IV: Time Reflections, created right in the middle of the lockdown and released in August 2025, Vincent Peirani continues this exploration and invites us to think about the rhythm of our lives. His accordion makes light of temporalities and becomes the summary of those last months. The addition of the talents of the five musicians showing up with their own musical molecules. A blend of the past, the future and especially this present to experience and share intensely. This moment is suspended in Théâtre Antique and combines intrinsically the quintet’s energy and the one of the audience. Thus, each title composed and arranged by Vincent Peirani carries a memory, a story to re-enact on stage with an urge of living.

Line-up :

• Vincent Peirani (accordion, accordina)
• Émile Parisien (soprano saxophone)
• Tony Paeleman (keyboards, piano)
• Julien Herné (bass)
• Yoann Serra (drums)