Comments from Roberto Martini

Paul Mauriat has always been, without any doubt, a true master of the harmony. His imagination and creativity as a composer, arranger and conductor have outlined an indelible artistic path of prodigious expressitivity.

But also, as a musical conductor of widely renown singers, Paul has been an original creator. He wisely blend the orchestral arrangements with the soloist voice, in a way that the singer with the instrumentation were interlaced in an indissoluble dialogue, where the orchestra does not accompanies nor brings a musical frame to the voice, but it also incorporates a dimension of harmonies and counterpoints that transformed each song into an artistic totality.

It is impossible to imagine, for example, "Que c'est sad Venice" with the voice of Charles Aznavour and an orchestration that wasn't from Paul Mauriat. There have been other beautiful versions of this song with other good voices, but the combination of Mauriat and Aznavour transformed it into a unique and artistic piece.

Following with the examples, also the union between the voice of Mireille Mathieu and the orchestra of Paul in "La premiere etoile" and other songs is indissoluble, as much so all the musical directors of Mireille must adopt the arrangements of Paul Mauriat every time the singer interprets the songs that were originally conducted by him.

This novel way to orchestrate that Paul approached left a trace in his time and was adopted by other good musical arrangers, but it might implied a strong dependence of the soloist towards his musical direction, fact that the majority of the productions seemed at the moment not willing to accept. Nevertheless, with the rebirth of the musical creativity that we all hope, the good singers will gladly approach this challenge that many years ago Paul Mauriat proposed with rejoice to all that love music.

 

Buenos Aires, Argentina


Roberto and his record collection