NEWS

Lucas Debargue

1 week ago

Mozart !… Beware, piano players : as for Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, you’ll meet with people who’ll just enjoy the music and your playing, but also with a lot of others who’ll feel obliged to explain to you, more or less delicately, that things « can’t be done like this ».
Articulation, phrasing, tempo, dynamics : this music becomes a minefield for the pianists who would take self-proclaimed Mozart experts too seriously.

Advocates of « mozartism » are like Smith agents of the musical matrix : you’ll always find one in any corner of the world…

My advise : let yourself deeply fall in love with the music, and just sing it with your OWN voice.

Would Mozart have been happier with musicians obeying to some standards with the desperate wish to be absolutely loyal to him, or with musicians making his music their own to be able to play it with their heart ? We’ll never know… We can only guess ! 😉 But one thing is for sure : you cannot combine pouring your heart into music making and apply a frozen code at the same time : it’s either the one or the other…

Choose well, acknowledging the nature of the risks implied by each option ! ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

2 weeks ago

This beginning gives a unique sensation on the keyboard, when one avoids unnecessary pedalling !
By keeping the fingers deep enough into the keys, one can feel the hammers staying close to the strings and really enjoy playing these obsessional opening chords.
#piano #music #beethoven #sonata ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

2 weeks ago

BACH Prelude BWV875 in D minor

This music, constantly flowing, cannot unfurl if locked in the frame of a metronomical, steady rhythm. A piano player would always benefit from listening to Bach’s solo works for strings : the technical impossibility to play flows of sixteen notes steadily on these instruments kept their musicians closer to the musical expression. Here though, I believe that the tempo variations are relatively minor because of the furious yet dancing mood. But I would still get quite free towards the end, and before, around some harmonic turning points.

#bach #piano #music #angry ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

2 weeks ago

#mozart #style #mood #jokes Music : Mozart’s K330 C major sonata, first movement. ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

2 weeks ago

#Mozart #crazy #music #piano #orchestra With all respect to our beloved Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ☺️ ! ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

2 weeks ago

I was so happy when I found out that the crazy bass + guitar rhythm can be hold with the single left hand ! #britney #song #music #groove ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

3 weeks ago

After many trials and tribulations, Rachmaninov finally reaches the radiant key of C major for his conclusion. Arriving here is always a very special experience on stage. #piano #music #rachmaninoff ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue is at İş Sanat.

3 weeks ago

Early February, looking at my concert programs, I realised that I would return to Istanbul with my dear friends of Kremerata Baltica Chamber Orchestra only with a concerto by Bach and a concerto by Mozart. Only? Yes, I did feel frustrated. Because it has become less and less acceptable to me to run from one stage to another without sharing my own music with the audience, in the form of a composition or an improvisation, for the sake of musical honesty.

To play the great masterpieces of the past may be enough for some performers and listeners - we often even hear such passionate statements as “a life is not enough to explore this or that masterpiece,” about pieces that were ironically often written faster than they’re practiced by their performers. It is definitely not enough for me, because I don’t think that any form of music-making can entirely rely on a pre-existing holy mountain of musical works, endlessly celebrated.

Let’s see things as they are: to spend a life subduing oneself to laboriously master and eventually (for the most adventurous ones) “reveal the hidden beauties” of pieces of the repertoire is also quite a sophisticated way to hide one’s musical self behind other musicians’ scores - an attitude that wouldn’t be assumed as such by its followers, but rather as a “noble” and “humble” (!) disposition toward the highest technical and spiritual requirements of the pieces.

Well, if Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky and all the others we love had thought that way, we wouldn’t have any music from them today. The truth is: they were not thinking and living as… classical musicians, in today’s definition. So what does it mean to be loyal to them, then? A musician cannot exist just through the music of others: even if it stays in his living room, he has to let something of his own speak out of his body—not only a “touch” or a “sound” when executing a piece of the repertoire.

This sort of existence is very recent, and can only be found in classical music, as if this “genre” would justify, by its complexity taken as a value in itself, committing the entire musicianship to the execution of pre-existing works. Indeed, “new” performers constantly pop out to deliver loyal interpretations of the same bunch of popular scores, but where are the new composers who would make the repertoire evolve, with attractive contemporary music that would have a chance to go beyond a niche? They exist, but their proportion is ridiculous - a drop of water in a tsunami of stunning new virtuosos.

I promised myself a few months ago to never play a single concert without some of my own music from then on. The urge I feel to do it is much stronger than the intimidation caused by so many masterpieces written by masters of the past. If one becomes too scrupulous and thinks that composing should only belong to geniuses, one would abstain for very dubious reasons - even a musician like Brahms had to overcome the shadow of Beethoven. So I wrote a piece for the occasion of this Istanbul concert, for strings and piano, based on Mozart’s ultra-famous “Alla Turca” finale movement of his A major piano sonata. It is in many ways a 7-minute light musical joke, composed in a couple of hours, without any other ambition than having fun on stage. The 10 variations involve direct references to Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Strauss, as well as a spooky waltz and bouncing tango rhythms. The coda aims to be an outburst of excitement.

Hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did when composing and playing it !

LD

👇FULL YOUTUBE video from İş Sanat is below in comments: 👇👇 ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

3 weeks ago

To me, the real difficulty of this passage is less related to its awkward, uncomfortable piano writing than to its musical content, far less substantial than most other places of the concerto. The danger here, then, is to spend incalculable amount of time on this few seconds passage to “gain” some “precision” without any musical purpose, reaching a place where you’re so much “technically set” that you make yourself completely unable to play music here - and in the rest of the concerto. I often heard that “technique serves music”, that looking for top precision isn’t contradictory with music making. But… it IS, as much as a sphere can’t make it into a cube of the same volume : everything has a cost. If you look for something else than music when working on music, you sacrifice music : there’s no “preparatory step” to music making that isn’t harmful to music making. One has to make a choice between immaculate precision and communicative playing : this is the beautiful thing with music, a lover that can’t be cheated on. #piano #technique #music ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

4 weeks ago

Happy Easter ! Piece of my variations on Gershwin "The man I love" performed in Romanian Athenaeum. ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

1 month ago

Happy World Piano Day !
www.facebook.com/reel/2155995858488636 ... Voir plusVoir moins