Lift

Description

The 28-year-old Japanese pianist Koki Nakano had already written pieces for cello and piano before composing for Vincent Segal. He sometimes names his pieces after the places he stays, as a way of keeping a travel diary through a Europe whose music he knows well. Here and there, one can recognize classical French or German music, just as his fondness for jazz and pop allows him to assimilate all these influences into his personal musical world. Some pieces sound rather classical, others repetitive. Yet his diversity creates a unity, between decomposed romanticism and exuberant minimalism. Virtuosity never conceals lyricism. "Spending hours rehearsing Koki Nakano's music without being able to hold a serious conversation is wonderful. No Japanese, no French, no English, no diplomacy, just one territory: the Art of Koki Nakano. The piano and cello are rudimentary tools, but they have a memory, DNA, a history, and these venerable, bulky, and impractical tools in the age of dematerialization are wonderful magicians. Thanks to them, without exchanging a word, there are questions, sweat, ardor, laughter, acrobatics, annoyance, the fear of doing wrong, the art of doing well, and plenitude. In the tiny studio in Buttes Chaumont where Koki resided, I could touch the upright piano with my bow and heat water with my left hand, but when I left, I felt like I had been on Mars, by a lake, in a Berlin loft, with fairies. Music means nothing, yet it is a matter of life and death for Koki Nakano." Vincent Segal