LDV98-9

16 CHOPIN | SECRET GARDEN When I was eleven I met Dominique Merlet, who later became my teacher at the Paris Conservatoire. At our first meeting, I played him Chopin’s Sonata no.3. He criticised my teacher for making me work on this piece, which he said was too difficult for me and physically dangerous. There was some truth in that. Nevertheless, I soon realised that his extremely rigorous standards, especially with respect to using the pedal as Chopin directs, were going to discourage me! I can never thank him enough for those brilliant pedagogical insights, which I only understood much later. There’s enough material in these few anecdotes to nourish a ‘Secret Garden’ consisting of all these pieces that I always wanted to record without daring to do so . . . In fact, a few months of lockdown accelerated the realisation of the project. To be honest, I would say this album seems to me to be the most ‘audacious’ in my discography. I took every possible risk, and how much I enjoyed it! What’s more, recording in the acoustic of the large hall of L’Arsenal in Metz offers remarkable atmospheric possibilities: one can reproduce a kind of sonic intimacy that is perfectly suited to this music. Where do you place Chopin’s output in your musical pantheon? Chopin is perhaps the greatest composer of all time, along with Wagner. Both men ‘fomented’ musical revolutions that were fed by their respective neuroses! Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano, Wagner essentially composed operas, and each of them completely renewed his favoured form.