LDV92

29 JEAN-PHILIPPE COLLARD ∙ BILKENT SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, EMIL TABAKOV ‘You have to strike straight at the heart and not over-intellectualise works you’ve frequented for years’, he says. Those works constitute a fabulous harvest, the fruits of Romanticism, from Chopin and Schumann right up to Rachmaninoff, made still more beautiful by two centuries of French music. All Jean-Philippe Collard’s sound worlds are impregnated with colour: the ‘sensation produced on the organ of sight by light variously reflected by bodies’, says the Littré dictionary, with an epicurean perception unusual in such a volume yet intensely familiar to a pianist who, precisely, declares that he is ‘hungry for colours’. But not just any colours. A gourmet of pigments, the artist knows what nuance means in every context, when sonic landscapes with a measured temperament resonate in the iridescence of arpeggios and the long finish of chords. When he recalls his apprenticeship with Pierre Sancan, his friendship with Vladimir Horowitz and his encounters all over the world with the elite of conductors and the foremost orchestras, Jean-Philippe Collard knows that he can tell the public everything. So he has paid tribute to the gods of colour, his composers.