CHRISTINE OTT - Éclats (Piano Works)

Two years after "Time To Die", Christine Ott returns with a new solo album – again on Richard Knox's Gizeh – after devoting herself to the duo Snowdrops and midwifing the projects Theodore Wild Ride and The Cry. As already happened with the excellent "Chimères (pour ondes Martenot)" from 2020, the French composer builds her fifth work around a single instrument, this time turning to the beloved piano, the voice through which, from a very young age, she used to escape reality and lose herself in a boundless imaginative world.

Not the cosmic magic unleashed by the resonances of the electrophonic instrument she plays so masterfully, but an entirely acoustic landscape steeped in an unmistakably classical imprint is the territory in which the twelve compositions gathered here take shape and develop, many dating back several years and some anticipating future works. The themes are the recurring ones in the brilliant multi-instrumentalist's output, from the climate emergency, which permeates the elegant dance of notes in the opening "Pluie d'arbres", to her love of cinema, once again declared in the Hitchcockian reference contained in the title and in the measured dissonances of "Vertigo".

The fil rouge linking the romantic vein of "Lunes orientales" to the torrential sequences of "Golden Valley" – at times comparable to the continuous music of Lubomyr Melnyk – is the grace of a compositional voice whose emotional weight comes through intact thanks to rare performing talent. The result is admittedly less overwhelming than the sidereal journeys guided by the ondes Martenot or the chromatic richness of the choral works, but as a whole it confirms the high quality of a body of work that's never banal, not even when it takes shape along paths less inclined toward experimentation.

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01/12/2023