Alexandre Brachet, pianist

Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in music and who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

I never really felt that I had decided to pursue a career in music. Music was always there, almost naturally, and gradually it stopped being simply something I did and became a way of understanding the world and understanding myself.

My first real musical shock came when I was twelve, when I discovered Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, particularly the Second. I remember the physical impression that this music made on me. Later, as I grew older, I dreamed of playing the Third, which I eventually had the chance to perform. And with maturity, I ultimately came to prefer the First above all. For me, it remains his greatest youthful masterpiece. Everything is already there: the personality, the depth, the harmonic richness, and especially that cadenza, which still fascinates me.

Two years later, at fourteen, I had a second revelation, this time through jazz. It was Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert. I will never forget the moment I discovered it. I was out in the street, it was raining, and I took shelter under a doorway, completely soaked. I started crying while listening to the music. I found it so beautiful, so deep. These were harmonic colours I had never heard before, a freedom I had never experienced in music in quite that way. From that day on, that music made me dream.

Then there were, of course, my two great teachers, Pierre Pradier, a student of Georges Cziffra, and later Evgueny Moguilevski. Both encounters profoundly shaped my musical path, each in his own way.

Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff have also been enormously important to me, but my musical world gradually expanded. Jazz and improvisation became an important part of it, as did guitar, composition and writing music for film.

And I cannot separate the way I think about music from everything that exists around it: literature, cinema, painting, and simply the experiences of life. All of these things enter into the way I listen and create.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

I think the greatest challenge for me has been genuinely acquiring the language of jazz.

Pianistic virtuosity, paradoxically, has never been my main problem. I have always had a great deal of technical facility. Even when I was very young, I could play very fast and adapt to practically any piano without really feeling that I was making a particular effort.

But playing fast is not the same as having control. Over the years, I have realised that control is probably a much deeper challenge than virtuosity itself.

As Cziffra used to say, playing fast is easy. And sometimes it is even a problem: with adrenaline and excitement, the fingers can start moving too quickly and everything can begin to run away from you. I am naturally someone whose nerves react very quickly, sometimes too quickly. I have always had this kind of inner “black beast” that wants to emerge, roar and go at full speed. A significant part of my work is precisely learning to calm it.

With jazz, the challenge was different. I really had to acquire a language: bebop, modern jazz, harmony, the different periods of jazz all the way to contemporary jazz. As a pianist essentially trained in the classical tradition, it was not enough to understand this music intellectually. I had to absorb it from the inside, until it became a language of my own.

It took me a long time. Today I can genuinely make use of that knowledge of the language of jazz, but I still consider acquiring it one of the great works of my musical life.

Which performances/recordings are you most proud of?

There are two that come to mind in particular.

The first goes back to my adolescence. I was seventeen and I was playing at La Vieille Charité in Marseille. After the concert, I was called back on stage and played the Turkish March in Arcadi Volodos’s arrangement, on an upright piano.

At one point, around three hundred people had gathered behind me, almost forming a circle to watch me play. I played that piece completely flat out, like a madman, on that poor upright piano. It was an extraordinary situation, and I have a very strong memory of it.

The other memory came much later, during a recital at La Criée Theatre in Marseille.

The hall was almost completely dark. Cameramen were positioned behind me to film the performance, and the lighting on the keyboard was very limited. I could barely see part of the keyboard: the middle was in darkness, while I could only vaguely see the bass and treble.

I played Chopin’s Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise brillante, a work that demands a great deal of control and lasts around fifteen minutes.

I remember the sensation very clearly: having to trust my hands and my relationship with the keyboard when I could not actually see everything. The performance was recorded, and that recording is still available on Spotify.

They are two very different memories, but both represent something important to me.

Which particular works/composers do you think you perform best?

Without a doubt, Liszt.

I feel that he reflects me very deeply. The only real difference between us is the size of our hands: his were much larger than mine!

But beyond technique, I recognise myself enormously in his personality, his aesthetic, his modernism, his sensitivity, his spirituality, and even his relationship with metaphysics.

When I read his music, I rarely feel that I have to struggle to understand what the composer is trying to say. I understand his intentions very quickly, his architecture, the direction in which he wants to take the music.

And what might appear in Liszt as excesses of virtuosity do not seem excessive to me at all. They seem perfectly logical in relation to what comes before and what comes after. Virtuosity is part of his language.

That is probably why Liszt is the composer with whom I feel most naturally in tune as a performer.

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

Above all, I try to explore new emotions and new harmonic and pianistic relationships through the composers I love.

Whenever I rediscover a work, or discover a composer I know less well, I feel that I am facing a new challenge. But there is also something very interesting in the fact that a work is never approached in isolation.

Our view of a composer also depends on everything we have played before him.

Playing Schumann after playing Chopin is one thing. Playing Schumann after playing Liszt is another. There is a historical heritage, relationships between composers, influences, rivalries and crossed perspectives. In their time, they lived alongside one another, knew one another, listened to one another and sometimes judged one another.

As modern performers, we have an additional freedom: we can choose our own path through this history. We can construct an aesthetic and chronological journey that belongs to us.

That freedom is something I find very interesting when choosing repertoire.

What do you do off stage that provides inspiration on stage?

I absolutely love playing guitar. It is a real source of happiness for me, and my relationship with it is very different from my relationship with the piano.

I particularly love the sensation of the strings beneath my fingers. It is very different from the piano, even when you are playing an exceptional instrument. I have always been fascinated by the physical sensation of wood, keys and the keyboard, especially on some old Steinways, but the direct vibration of a string beneath the fingers produces something completely different.

I particularly enjoy playing jazz guitar, because of its warmth and its very direct relationship with sound.

I think this practice also feeds my relationship with the piano. It reminds me that music is first and foremost something physical: sound passes through the body, through the fingers, through contact with the instrument.

Of course, I am not talking about hurting yourself or damaging your fingers. The pleasure comes precisely from having a physical relationship with the instrument while keeping it healthy.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

I think my most memorable concert experience was an evening when I had played a private concert in the Var, when I was still young.

I was playing on a beautiful piano and, afterwards, I found myself invited to a birthday party. The people there were not musicians and were not particularly familiar with the classical repertoire.

At one point I became a little bored and noticed that there was an upright piano in a room next to the main hall.

I went into that room and started playing.

Little by little, the people at the party began leaving the main room and coming into this small room to listen to me. Eventually I found myself giving, almost spontaneously, a second concert for everyone on this little upright piano.

It is probably one of the most beautiful memories of my musical life.

Nobody had come for a concert. Nobody had prepared themselves to listen to classical piano. There were no particular expectations. And yet, little by little, everyone ended up there.