‘I have concentrated my entire personality in my Goyescas. I fell in love with the psychology of Goya and his palette: with
his ladylike maja; with his aristocratic majo; with Goya himself and the Duchess of Alba, with their quarrels, their love, their flirtations. That rosy whiteness of their cheeks contrasted with blond lace and black velvet contrasted with fastenings, those supple-waisted bodies, those motherof-pearl and jasmine hands resting on jet pendants – all of this has enchanted me.’
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Rigour is the key concept in Jean-Philippe Collard’s style, which may seem like a fantastic paradox when one discovers the imagination of his interpretations. The beauty of his pianism conjures up a sensual, fragrant and delicate Spain. Into this atmosphere come the popular Goyescas, almost improvised and as if sung by the voices of an imaginary opera!
Jean-Philippe Collard belongs to that category of artists who move through space in the same way as they play: the measured gestures brush past the lights until he sits down in front of the instrument. The pianist has come to listen to those who have come to hear him. What he proposes is a dialogue without words. Just through the eyes and then through sound. An infinity of sounds.
This very special complicity conceals all the preparatory work that comes before the concert: the need to forget one’s nervousness (how long afternoons are before going on stage!), to dominate an impatient body, to channel one’s courage, the self-control of the final moments before the leap into the void, it all depends. It is necessary, he says, ‘to be sucked into the music, to be calm enough to find your way back to spontaneity, and to captivate the audience’. The urge to convey and reveal the beauty of music exceeds the nature of a mere passion: it is a matter of vital necessity, for which one must resolve to share one’s own emotions, without the desire to conquer those of others in return. An offering, now of immense proportions after hundreds of concerts and more than sixty recordings.
‘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.
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CHOPIN // Preludes, Funeral March 
FAURÉ // Barcarolles op.19 
RACHMANINOV // Six Moments musicaux - MOUSSORGSKI // Pictures at an Exhibition 
SCHUMANN // Fantasy, Kreisleriana 
SCRIABINE, RIMSKY-KORSAKOV // Jean-Philippe Collard 
