21 ROMAIN LELEU & THOMAS LELEU Is the notion of pastiche relevant to your approach to certain pieces, in the neoclassical spirit that prevailed between the wars? Thomas Leleu: We weren’t inspired by that approach, because we didn’t tackle these arrangements in an analytical spirit. In fact, we concentrated on the colours of the two instruments and how best to obtain light, pearly sonorities. I’d like to come back to Handel’s Passacaglia, one of our favourite works because it’s emblematic of this exploration of contrasts, dynamics and colours. In the end, your musical philosophy is quite close to the artists of the Baroque period, who saw music as an art of entertainment, in the noblest sense of the term, and whose deliberate lightness was the opposite not of profundity, but of heaviness. What’s more, we can also sense the appeal that improvisation holds for you, as the link between the Baroque world and jazz. Romain Leleu: Yes, definitely. Our choices and tastes are instinctive, and we also know from trying them out in concert that certain pieces appeal to audiences. That’s the case with Manhã de Carnaval by Luis Bonfá, one of the standards of this Brazilian guitarist. I play it with a particular mute on the trumpet, in a nod to Miles Davis.
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