Legendes

The word 'legend' suggests to everyone a distant, wonderful story, which is reinvented every time it is told. There is no longer any present or past; we enter the borderless space of the imaginary and the timeless. In composing Légendes, I wanted to create on the piano the same idea of blurring the gap between past and present, and of freedom of the imagination. The eleven pieces on this album are presented as an inner journey, a listening itinerary that forms a kind of narrative thread without words. Illusions, mirages, distortions, echoes: all these effects on which Légendes plays were achieved through a form of intimacy with the piano. The play on contrasts (distance and proximity, emptiness and fullness) and the approach to harmonic texture attempt to create a new sound space that might be described as a spectra-tonal halo. The Finnish pianist Laura Mikkola, who recorded these works, has brought out all their resonances in masterly fashion. David Chaillou