LDV104

45 JEAN-BAPTISTE FONLUPT To refine, with Michael Endres, the capacity for elegance, clarity and simplicity in Mozart and Schubert. To broaden the scope of his repertory with Elisso Virssaladze and open out the sound space of the piano with her. Jean-Baptiste Fonlupt dreams of a dimension: that of the orchestra, of opera which he loves hearing everywhere he goes, on the most prestigious stages. His sculpting of sonority, variety of timbres, intense lyricism or, as the case may be, tender restraint, all tend towards this ideal of making the audience forget the king of instruments, while at the same time exalting its presence. The walker, the wayfarer, is also a pilgrim. He goes to meet the composers of the past in the places where their works first saw the light, from the banks of the Rhine at Bonn where Schumann’s soul hovers, to Nohant to follow in the footsteps of Chopin, or to Ravel’s house, Le Belvédère, in order to sense, to perceive what is instinctive in their music, with Liszt especially, what springs forth over and above the musical architecture and the rigour it imposes, and to become a storyteller or a painter at every opportunity when the music offers its images, as does that of Rachmaninov or Stravinsky. And he is an interpreter of his time, to whom today’s composers, his new ‘heroes’, entrust their creations: hence the music of Florentine Mulsant further extends his repertory, which begins with Bach. The stage is his universe, where, alone or accompanied, he shares musical time. And that time depends on the audience he listens to, the silence that inspires him. Like his mountains bathed in silence, it is his natural element, his zone of freedom, where he knows he is happy. Then the magic of the instant can come into play, and the emotion of music is born to the world . . .