In 2024, the Luxembourgish audience had the opportunity to hear you in your «Mozart expedition». This season, you are offering a completely different kind of expedition, a rather lengthy one, as you will be performing in three very different configurations at the Philharmonie, following a concert with the Luxembourg Philharmonic in Trier in September. How do you envision this residency, in which you are simultaneously pianist, organist, improviser and conductor?
This idea of residency within an institution is always fascinating because today we have become accustomed to viewing a musician's various activities as completely separate. But I believe we should remember that in the classical period, there was no distinction: composing, playing an instrument, conducting an orchestra or even talking about music were all aspects of the same activity, namely sharing a love for this art. It is this concept that I would like to defend, and which a residency such as the one I am embarking on at the Philharmonie allows me to do. A residency is the ideal format for presenting my many activities and expressing myself. Especially since Luxembourg has a wonderful orchestra, as well as the Philharmonie, one of my favourite concert halls, and an instrument, the organ, which allows for a vast repertoire to be played.
How important is it to you to return to the same familiar place, in this case the Philharmonie? I’m asking you this question because I know you have a special connection to places, such as your church in Hirson...
The first thing you notice when you go to a concert is the venue. A venue always has a certain atmosphere, a certain feeling, which speaks to the human subconscious and gives the event a special character. I remember a concert where Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was on the programme, but before it began, for some reason I can't remember, a minute's silence was observed. This really defined the way I appreciated the symphony. I know the work very well, so there were no surprises in terms of the notes heard, but the fact that I was put in a certain mind-set by something that was not part of the musical performance really made the evening unforgettable. Obviously, for most concerts as a professional musician – I use this word objectively, meaning someone who earns a living through music – you play for occasions that you are unfamiliar with or with which you have no personal connection. However, it becomes much more meaningful when you associate it with friendships, human stories or personal memories. This is the impression I get when I return to Luxembourg because I know that in the audience and around me are people I have known for several years, and that this is an auditorium I have experienced from both sides, from the audience and from the stage. This venue is extraordinary, even from the outside: the columns, resembling a forest, are similar to those found in ancient Greco-Roman architecture; they allow me to mentally enter another universe. For me, this hall brings together a confluence of very inspiring memories.
« We leave our respective baggage at the door »
The audience will discover you improvising alongside jazzman Michael Wollny on 25.11.2025. tell us about your relationship to jazz.
I enjoy listening to and studying jazz, of which I am a passive fan, and I find it very interesting to improvise with people from different styles. With Michael Wollny, our project is based on the observation that today, in music, many different directions coexist, perhaps more than ever before in history. So we not only have choices to make, but also something to invent: in classical music, this is called style, and in jazz, it is called sound, unique to each individual. We are both curious about all the music known to date, from medieval European music to the hallucinations produced by modern artificial intelligence. But when we perform together, we decide to put it all aside, at the door of an imaginary room that we are going to invent and imagine. We leave our respective baggage at the door and enter this new space, without wanting to reproduce what we have known before. There may well be a few echoes of the past, because we don't try to invent everything from scratch, but these influences are implicit. In our improvisations, we simply try to use our skills in all the styles we have experienced. They are therefore genuine, and that is the most important thing. We agree in the moment on the sound to create in order to fill this room that we have invented.
After this improvisation concert, you will be performing on 19.01.2026 alongside musicians including two members of the Berliner Philharmoniker…
We are offering a programme based on piano quartets by Mozart – specifically the one we did not play during the «expedition» back in April 2024 – Fauré and Beethoven. Given that three of the four performers, including myself, took part in it, you could say that we are carrying on from where we left off. This is truly chamber music in the classical sense. When you are a composer like me, you see all music as chamber music: each line of the score, each voice is associated with a person, the fruit of our imagination, and as such, chamber music has always been central to my life as a musician. So much so that, during my studies, I often arranged the scores for orchestra, organ and even piano that I had to work on for chamber ensembles. When I was living in Berlin, there were many musicians available whom I invited to my home to sight-read unfamiliar pieces and arrangements that I had specially made for the occasion. It was interesting to be able to discuss the works I was studying with them.
« The question is not whether you have enough fingers to play. »
Have you ever wanted to be part of a fixed ensemble?
No, because at that time, I realised that I was primarily interested in other people's ideas and in adapting to them. Ultimately, what fascinates me about classical music is the opportunity to enter into someone else's mind through the scores of composers who are no longer with us. I am drawn to playing with those with whom I do not feel a complete affinity because I gain so much from it. Chamber music also allows you to get inside the minds of the fellow musicians you play with and benefit from all their experience. In the case of Noah Bendix-Balgley, who will be the violinist for this January concert, we are talking about a wealth of experience, gained from his work in orchestras — particularly with the Berliner Philharmoniker — but also as a chamber musician, conductor and concertmaster. Just playing a few bars with him is incredibly enriching!
Chamber music also offers the opportunity to bring together several ways of playing, even those that seem incompatible at first glance, and to find a way to adapt to the ideas of others. While some ensembles insist on homogeneity, I believe that the idea of chamber music is to combine several personalities. For if the composer had wanted homogeneity, he would have written the score accordingly, for a single person. The question is not whether you have enough fingers to play. Chamber music must truly be a combination of personalities that are distinctly different.
The final concert of your residency is a recital combining the piano and the organ on 29.04.2026. What is your relation to these two instruments?
The first thing I must say is that these are two of the easiest instruments to play. All you have to do is press a button to produce a sound, which cannot be modified once it has been emitted. No matter how you press the button, the sound will be exactly the same. They are instruments of illusion, where we strive to make people believe that we are creating something beyond the mechanical process alone. From this point of view, we are a bit like a conductor who, by definition, works with existing sounds produced by the orchestra, which he himself has not produced. His role is to impose or create a musical vision, which can be called an interpretation of the work in question. Ultimately, the organist or pianist does the exact same thing. They work with the sounds produced by the instrument and then devise a combination, sometimes modulating them in subtle ways, which gives rise to a vision of the work they are interpreting. That is what I will be doing in this concert.
