A journey through three centuries of French music: the mystical fervor of Messiaen, the baroque elegance of Rameau, the childlike poetry of Debussy, and the orchestral vertigo of Ravel. From contemplation to ecstasy, this program highlights the many facets of the piano, between silence, dance, tenderness, and chaos.

This program is very special to me. The first composer was my favorite in my youth, and the other is so deeply ingrained in my own pianistic language that I feel like a mirror to his music. Their works were profoundly marked by their experience as émigrés. When discussing Rachmaninoff’s emigration, his nostalgia for Russia is often mentioned. But I’ve always felt there was a certain falseness in the claim that he stopped composing because of this nostalgia. Having experienced emigration myself, I can say with greater certainty what this pain consisted of: the pain of a man deprived of his familiar points of reference, forced to rebuild his career from scratch, here and now—but always out of sync… Rachmaninoff rewrote his works and republished them. This allowed him to sign publishing contracts in the United States without conflicting with the Russian publishers who already held the rights to his earlier compositions. The Sonata No. 2, Op. 36, was revised in 1931. It became shorter and its form clearer. Rachmaninov removed immense fragments, so beautiful that many performers choose to reintegrate them, creating their own third, fourth, or fifth version. It remains rich. Indecently so. There is a passage in the second movement where a golden sequence sounds so explicit that, if percussion were added, it would almost sound like a folk tune. Rachmaninov was well aware of this tendency toward exuberance in his writing and performed his works with deliberate restraint and a profound honesty toward his music. Prokofiev was an enfant terrible. Noisy and eccentric, he shook up modern traditions; his "football-like" style erased the norms of piano playing, relegating legato from its dominant position. Yet, this clamor harbors a crystalline lyricism, an infinity of subtle emotions. Unlike Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev's music does not suffer from an excess of sweetness or pathos. It speaks of the present moment, of what happens every day. A moment, an impression… and it's gone. This is how Visions fugitives, Op. 22, are constructed. Prokofiev works with time in a highly original way. His pieces do not exist in artistic time, but in realistic time. In other words, he does not condense musical events and emotional states into a typical narrative form; his narrative takes the form of a thought or an emotion, naturally following its temporal unfolding. Sometimes it's just a single emotion—an idea crosses my mind, then another… no, actually not… Then, he abruptly interrupts this imaginary flight, and we fall back into reality: the chair is broken, even the rain is barely falling. In 1936, Prokofiev returned to the USSR. His Romeo and Juliet was booed. In 1948, his Spanish wife, Carolina Codina Nemisskaya, was arrested and spent eight years in the Gulag. And the defiant, lyrical Prokofiev began writing “correct” socialist music.

The program features works from the Romantic era, from Schubert—generally considered the first Romantic composer—to late Romanticism, and even to the post-Romanticism of Richard Wagner. Opus 90 is undoubtedly one of Schubert’s last compositions. It was also the last work I learned and performed in Russia, when the war had already begun and it was clear that it would not end quickly. This work became a profoundly personal experience for me. Late Romanticism is inextricably linked to philosophical thought, particularly German philosophy. The increasing complexity of harmonic language and modes of development led to the destruction of classical musical forms and the emergence of freer musical structures. The Sonata in B minor is one of the most symbolic and intellectually rich works, at least in Franz Liszt’s repertoire. Its incredible semantic density imposes its own rules and defies any pre-existing structure. Content shapes form; Liszt's genius elegantly finds a balance between space and time, free from all constraints. The Sonata in B minor, the overture to "Tristan und Isolde," and Nietzsche's piano miniatures all belong to the same mental space, the same aesthetic. Yes, I wasn't mistaken, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote music. Wagner, Liszt, and Nietzsche are figures of the same era and the same Europe. To grasp this, imagine a Montreal where, in one way or another, everyone knows each other. Nietzsche and Wagner were friends from 1868 to 1872: not mere acquaintances, but true friends, who eventually fell out. Wagner was married to Cosima, Liszt's daughter. Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde was a scandal. It's safe to say that no film has ever inspired so much hatred and idolatry. Opera has become an essential part of the repertoire, and the overture and final scene are often performed separately, becoming symbols of the exaltation and madness of desire. If you can't stand opera, watch Lars von Trier's Melancholia. He uses the magnetism of Wagner's music to convey a sense of attraction and inevitability: it's so powerful that we almost physically feel the fatal convergence of two planets.

A program featuring the works of the great poet of the piano