Description
The forty-two-year-old Swiss pianist Cédric Pescia magnifies Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. He demonstrates by setting out in a few moments an ‘acoustic theatre’. Here is the blinding evidence of a great performer.
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Robert Schumann, who revered Johann Sebastian Bach, recommended that young pianists should make the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier their ‘daily bread’. The collection is indeed familiar to many from an early age, but most performers (pianists, harpsichordists and even organists) only give it in concert and record it after ‘moulding’ that bread every day in the secrecy of their practice rooms.
Musicians tackle The Well-Tempered Clavier in the same way as actors play Shakespeare’s Lear or singers perform Schubert’s Winterreise, once they have reached the appropriate age. The cycle is testing for the fingers, but perhaps even more so for the brain: these stylistically differentiated preludes and complex fugues must be given an overall coherence that does not diminish the singularity of their parts. Each component of The Well-Tempered Clavier can be one thing and its opposite.
The forty-two-year-old Swiss pianist Cédric Pescia magnifies Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. He demonstrates by setting out in a few moments an ‘acoustic theatre’. Here is the blinding evidence of a great performer.
Cédric Pescia was born in Lausanne and holds joint Swiss and French nationality. He studied at the Conservatoires of Lausanne (Christian Favre) and Geneva (Dominique Merlet), the Universität der Künste in Berlin (Klaus Hellwig) and the Lake Como International Piano Academy (Dmitri Bashkirov, Leon Fleisher, Andreas Staier, William Grant Naboré, Fou Ts’ong). Alongside this he received advanced tuition from Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Daniel Barenboim, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Irwin Gage, Ilan Gronich, Christian Zacharias and the Alban Berg Quartet. He won first prize at the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition 2002 in Salt Lake City, USA. Cédric Pescia appears in recital and with orchestra in Europe, the USA, China and South America. His notable engagements have included the Philharmonie and Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Wigmore Hall in London, the Salzburg Mozarteum, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Shanghai Oriental Art Center, the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Prague Spring, the Lucerne Festival, the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, the Schleswig- Holstein Musik Festival, the Davos Festival and Klavierfestival Ruhr.
He enjoys a longstanding artistic partnership with the violinist Nurit Stark and is artistic director of the Lausanne chamber music series Ensemble enScène.
Cédric Pescia has been awarded a scholarship from the Fondation Leenaards of Lausanne and the Music Prize of the Fondation Vaudoise pour la Culture. In 2012 he was appointed professor of piano at the Haute École de Musique in Geneva.