Viva ELVIS highlights the music of an American icon who changed rock and roll
forever. Elvis Presley created an art form for the masses with his voice, his
movements and his provocative image as the herald of adolescent rebellion in
the 1950s and 1960s. His music was an explosive mixture of rhythm and blues,
gospel, country and the music of the South that brought rock and roll to the
forefront of popular music.
Evoking the spirit of Elvis in a contemporary perspective
By creating a reinterpretation of the music of Elvis, Cirque du Soleil set out to
present the songs of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll in a contemporary form that evokes
the spirit of Elvis in every way.
“What would the songs of Elvis be like if he were doing them for the first time
today?” asks Musical Director and Arranger Erich van Tourneau. “With all humility,
I set out to evoke the soul and the spirit of Elvis Presley, while building a bridge
between his music and future generations of fans.”
A fusion of Southern music and the culture of rock
The styles of Viva ELVIS move from Delta blues to rockabilly, soul to gospel,
through Dixie and Southern folk music. Some of the songs even evoke garage
rock and punk, steeped in waves of hip-hop and urban music. But one thing is
certain and remains consistent: the sound of Viva ELVIS is pure rock.
Tapping into the rich catalog of Elvis
One of the biggest challenges was to establish a balance in the selection of
songs. The score had to include enough of Elvis’s hits but not be a simple “bestof”
playlist. Some of the songs were chosen to fit the narrative of the show, but
above all it was Presley’s boundless energy and his disarming charisma that
dictated van Tourneau’s choices. "I wanted to highlight his rebel side, recall his
sexy and provocative facets and seize the powerful and charismatic Elvis you
see in the documentary Elvis ‘56 and Elvis, the television broadcast of his 1968
comeback concert," he says. One thing’s for sure: choosing thirty songs from
such a rich catalog of work by the greatest songwriters of the era was as
delicate a task as it was challenging.
Sampling and textures
Armed with tens of thousands of samples of Elvis’s voice, Erich van Tourneau,
assisted by Ugo Bombardier, often wove several sequences and colors into the
same songs, sometimes changing the key. In creating his remix, Erich was looking
to accentuate and boost the emotional charge of the songs. For example, he
incorporated ragga rhythms into King Creole, and urban and hip-hop sounds
into Blue Suede Shoes. But in all such cases, the watchword was to be respectful
of the spirit of the original recordings.
The voice of Elvis
The live singers in Viva ELVIS are all female; the only male voice is that of Elvis
himself – on the grounds that only Elvis could possibly do justice to Elvis when it
came to portraying his vitality and seductive charm. Isolating his voice on the
original recordings was a major technical challenge, because his voice and the
instruments were almost always recorded on the same tracks.
A few more details
- Before starting work, Erich van Tourneau and Ugo Bombardier reviewed
and recorded 914 authorized and unauthorized albums and countless
films, concert recordings, interviews and home recordings – a job that
took more than 3,000 hours!
- 17,765 samples of Elvis songs – the raw material of the show – were made
during the process of creating the musical score.
- In addition to the four female singers, the team of nine musicians consists
of a drummer, a bassist, two guitarists, a pianist, a trombonist, a
saxophonist, a trumpeter and a percussionist.