LDV31

What do you find appealing in the fortepiano?

The instrument exudes a nostalgic charm: you find yourself projected back into

another era. Butmore than the relationshipwith the past, it’s the relationshipwith

the sound, with the fingers, that interests me. The fragility of the sound perturbs

the player’s physical and mental relationship with the instrument. Supercharged

virtuoso pianists, accustomed to mastering the keyboard and jacking up the

decibels, find themselves faced with an instrument that is at once fragile and

ungovernable. The approach is not at all the same. The fortepiano neither tolerates

force nor accepts perfection. It resists all those automatisms that are necessary

on the modern piano. That transforms the relationship with the interpretation

and leads to greater humility: we are no longer sole masters of the situation, but

listening out for flaws, imperfections, the hammer that creaks. Indeed, I quite

deliberately chose to keep these rough edges on the recording.

What are the virtues of this confrontation?

I didn’t conceive this programme in terms of confrontation, either between the

composers or between the instruments. It’s more of a companionship. The idea

was to couple on disc two composers and two instruments that cohabit in an

astonishingly harmonious way. My aim isn’t to prove some point or other, or to

chop and change: it was my personal journey that ledme, in the most natural way,

to a project of this nature. It corresponds to my career path.

MOZART // CLEMENTI