Yves Duteil in Montreal: the singer offered an intimate and warm show

UPGRADE DAY

Highlighting his 50-year career, singer-songwriter Yves Duteil finally presented his Paths of Freedom Thursday evening at the Outremont Theater in Montreal, a place that has a very important meaning for him. 

It is in this same venue on Bernard Avenue that the “most Quebecois of French singers”, as he likes to describe himself, gave his first concert across the Atlantic half a century ago.

He presented Thursday evening, in front of an attentive and respectful, the songs from his latest opus, Respect, released in 2018, including the title track, Le passeur de lumière– which he wrote for Jean, the father of his wife Noëlle –, as well as Armés d'amour and Mohammed, Aïcha.

< /p>

Arrived on stage shortly after 8 p.m., the singer took the time to welcome the applause of his audience, standing in the middle of the stage, eyes riveted on him and the smile broadly, before taking a seat at the piano. He first played L’Ecritoire then A l’abri du Meilleur.

He continued with the play The prison wall opposite, while a first musician, Philippe Nadal on the cello, joined him. The other two, François Marion on double bass and Dominic Cloutier on percussion, followed to give life to Argentina, a song written for a friend and ex-neighbor who left his native land to follow the love and settle in this South American country.

For this piece, the singer-poet has swapped his piano bench for his stool installed in front of the stage where he landed, his guitar in hand. A passage he borrowed nearly a dozen times during the evening.

Between the songs, the singer took the time to tune his string instrument, giving rise to many moments of silence “soft as a caress”, he noted at the end of his show, postponed twice due to the pandemic.

< p>The atmosphere was intimate, conducive to confidences and stripped of artifice. Yves Duteil, himself soberly dressed in a blue shirt and black pants, was very close to his audience, given the smallness of the room, but also by being talkative and warm towards him. He took the time to put practically all of his songs into context, notably recounting that the birth of his grandson had inspired the song If I were your path, in which he puts his words on his shared feeling of wanting to let him do things, but also to guide him on the right path.

The singer obviously played the essentials of his musical repertoire, such as the piece Prendre un enfant, which was warmly applauded by the audience from the very first notes, La langue de chez nous, kept at the end of the concert, and Mélancolie, on which the public hummed the last notes.

Yves Duteil will present his Chemins de liberté this Friday in Lévis, at L'Anglicane. He continues his Quebec tour until April 8.