LDV38.1

21 CÉDRIC PESCIA What is the place of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works in your life as a musician? To be honest, two composers have been at the heart of my repertory ever since childhood: Schumann and Bach. I must have been seven or eight years old when my mother gave me the score of a work whose name was quite unpronounceable for the little boy I was then: Das wohltemperierte Klavier . Of course, I was unable to play most of the pieces, but it was already my musical universe. Later on, I worked on Bach’s music with my various teachers and then distanced myself from their conceptions in order to find my own path. In the course of time I learnt Bach’s entire keyboard output. I played the harpsichord and the clavichord and spent a year studying all the cantatas, which is essential if you want to understand his entire corpus properly. My encounter with Andreas Staier, with whom I studied the Goldberg Variations, was deeply inspiring.