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What style do you try to impose?
Whatever the repertory I tackle, my priority has always been piano sound. I look
for what the pianist Samson François called the ‘Blue Note’, that is to say, the ideal
note at the ideal moment. The note in all its plenitude. Once you gain control of the
sound, you can control the discourse, the momentum of the musical phrase. The
experience of recording allows you to go still further in that quest. Paradoxically,
recordings are responsible for a certain uniformity of sound. When I was young, I
could recognise the greatest pianists by their sound. Today, unfortunately, piano
playing is dominated by a kind of linearity.
Chopin’s music poses the problem of rubato. How do you find the
right balance?
I’mguided by a precept: rubatomust not distort space-time, affect the rhythm, the
pulse. Freedom is expressed within the spatio-temporal framework. I also apply
this rule to the way I mould sonority: I try to handle the sound in such a way as to
shape the musical phrase so that each note obtains its specific weight.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COLLARD