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Between dream and reality at the piano: Bertrand Chamayou explores the sounds of lullabies It is music between waking and dreaming, full of suggestive power, evocative rhythms and gentle harmonies. The genre in which the pianist Bertrand Chamayou has discovered a whole world of music on the threshold of vision and reality is certainly one of the most underestimated: Berceuses, lullabies. The sixteen piano pieces Chamayou combines in the album Good Night! span a bridge from the 19th to the 21st century. The most recent title (Song for Octave by Bryce Dressner) was commissioned by Chamayou himself, father of two small children. All in all, the programme invites you to a unique musical journey, intense in its diversity and expressiveness. “I have always loved the genre of the lullaby because I myself suffer from insomnia,” says Chamayou about the project. “There is that one moment just before you fall asleep, when so many things go through your mind, connected with many emotions from fear to deep calm. That’s where this music is located – halfway between dream and reality.” Something very personal tipped the scales for the album: “I became a father, and I searched in vain in the relevant playlists for songs that really had something to say”. Typical for the piano lullaby, as it was cultivated in classical music as an instrumental transformation of the image of a mother weighing her child, is the sound exploration of seemingly limited rhythms and soft, almost childlike melodies. The more intensively Chamayou searched, the more it became apparent how diverse the genre is. “Every composer,” the pianist said, “conjures up his own worlds, each with his own echo of the unconscious.” Besides Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, the French composer Mel Bonis, her compatriot Charles-Valentin Alkan and the Russians Mili Balakirew and Sergei Lyapunov, Chamayou also discovered lullabies at Villa-Lobos, Janáček and Martinů. With the avant-gardist Helmut Lachenmann he even discovered atonal lullabies. The stylistically extremely versatile American Bryce Dressner composed the post-minimalist Song for Octave – for the album, but primarily for his own son. |