Good night!

Description

A soothing and relaxing journey into the heart of the most beautiful lullabies by pianist Bertrand Chamayou (4 Victoires de la Musique) CHOPIN, LISZT, BRAHMS, GRIEG, BUSONI, VILLA LOBOS... INCLUDES: AN UNRELEASED COMPOSITION BY BRYCE DESSNER OF THE BAND THE NATIONAL. Through sixteen subtly chosen lullabies, pianist Bertrand Chamayou offers us an enveloping album with a program of great diversity spanning the Romantic era to the present day. The miniature pieces by Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg and Villa Lobos are joined by rarer gems by Lyapounov, Alkan, Bonis and Lachenmann. With this new album, recorded in Dolby Atmos 3D, Bertrand Chamayou reveals the dreamlike quality and magic of these sublime piano pieces. “A masterpiece as much as the consecration of the genre in 1844, Chopin’s Berceuse is most certainly one of the warmest and most enveloping there is, just like the most famous of them all, Brahms’s, while Balakirev moves from sweetness to terror in a lullaby crossed by the nightmare of a funeral march. In almost the same way, Grieg disrupts the softness of his Lyric Piece with a brief episode evoking gnomes and elves. There is also the ambiguity of Liszt’s Chant du berceau (Wiegenlied), which joins the purity of early childhood with the resignation of the end of life. In the line of these 19th- and 20th-century gems, Bryce Dessner did me the honor and the friendship of delivering an enchanting lullaby composed at the beginning of 2020, intended for this album but also and above all for his son Octave. Far from the redundancy that can be generated by a mosaic of pieces of a single genre, this succession of lullabies was first imagined as a narrative with multiple inflections, between innocence and introspection.” --- Bertrand Chamayou ---. “No musical genre expresses this better than the Lullaby. Behind its apparent simplicity, it expresses the quintessence of the human soul. It reaches children’s hearts just as much as it revives the candor that dozes beneath our adult shells. I have always had a soft spot for lullabies; in fact, I had a vague idea for this program for a very long time already. It was undoubtedly fatherhood that rekindled the desire, the fact of taking on the role of the one who puts to sleep and comforts, while projecting one’s own worries. Since the piano repertoire surely contains the finest pieces of the genre, especially since Chopin, I undertook a small collecting project, very exciting, half-childlike, half-esoteric, which could be likened to a treasure hunt, or to reading old grimoires from which one would like to extract magic potion recipes. I have never had a grimoire in my hands, but this is indeed magic, fantasy, even the fantastic. In any case, dreaminess, with all that it can entail: the extreme tenderness of Janácek’s “Dobrou noc !” (Good night!), the melancholy of Mel Bonis’s “La Toute Petite s’endort” or of the “Berceuse d’une poupée” by the far too little-known Serge Lyapounov, the enchantment of the first of his Études d’exécution transcendante; the naivety of Villa-Lobos’s little poor girl (“A pobrezinha”), the hallucinations of Busoni’s Berceuse or Lachenmann’s Wiegenmusik, with its resonances evocative of a shadow theater, the passion, sometimes restrained, sometimes ardent, of Liszt’s great lullaby, the morbidity of Martinu’s (“Ukolébavka”) or even the serenity of Alkan’s prelude, aptly titled “J’étais endormie, mais mon coeur veillait ...”.” --- Bertrand Chamayou ---. “I am an insomniac. And I admit I derive a certain pleasure from it, deep down. Every evening I tirelessly oppose the same resistance to sleep’s embrace, I drag my feet to get to bed, I struggle (consciously) against the heaviness that falls upon my eyelids. I often wonder why I so enjoy lingering in this state, oscillating between the reality around me and the assaults of REM sleep, when letting go and reverie merge, teased by sudden jolts. Certainly the desire to savor each minute of nocturnal life again and again, like an ultimate luxury. In trying to grasp the mystery that emanates from this near-silence, the softness offered by human inactivity; while listening to the beating heart of thousands of sleeping souls in the neighboring buildings or houses. The moment of falling asleep is very ordinary, whether one is an insomniac or not, it is a daily, banal instant. But it is also — and above all — universal. It is the interstice into which the most diverse feelings slip, from tenderness to fear, from the fullness brought by tranquility to the anguish of emptiness, the fear of being in the dark. It is there that the sources of joy and anxiety pour out, there where each being, in their own way, feels a great need for affection and comfort. It is these intertwining feelings, this emotional confluence that I wanted to portray in this album.