At once a collection of prayers and poetry, psalms and haikus, Supplications invites the listener to save his or her soul and body in the face of the disasters we experience. The author prays to the elements such as light, wind, or water to preserve us, to soothe our anxieties, but also to our own feelings to spare us. Simple and rich, these very short texts have several levels of reading. Each piece describes a vital need, and is the subject of a different prayer, to finish, the author, asks the World not to forget us in its reconstruction, and invites his fellow men to embody Hope.

Word of the composer
“When Jean-Philippe Billman asked me if he could include Supplications in the Exosphere program, I accepted with joy and gratitude. Jean-Philippe is a conductor, musician and composer of the highest quality, absolutely profound and sincere in his approach. A talented artist, inspired by dance, he has made Exosphere a professional choir of great stature, balanced, modern, and wonderfully sounding, and very experienced in the different music of our time.
I hope that the Supplications will give the singers, the audience, as much pleasure as I had in writing them. I also hope that they will touch them and participate in awakening in them a little of the sweetness necessary to prepare for the world to come. Bertrand RICHOU”

Word from Jean Philippe Billmann
“I experienced a direct crush on Bertrand Richou’s Supplications: The deep meaning of the texts particularly seduced me because they place the human in its relationship to transcendence, through an “elementary” sacred. They evoke the creation but also the re-creation so that the world to come is a place where the human being reconnects with the living, for a renewal of sacredness and spirituality.
It is therefore important for me to be able to create these works which are so much a part of contemporary time, in view of its difficulties and its stakes. It is also with joy that I will direct Supplications in a festival with sacred colors: the “Sacred Days” are imposed as a necessity, in a climate where the Human needs to find himself precisely in his humanity, this common and original space where the freedom of each one to be an individual is the source of the encounter of the other. “