ETUDES POUR PIANO - deuxième livre（2016）

Piano studies seem now to have become the focal point in my creative output. I have been working on the second volume of studies since 2016 and finally completed the set in summer 2024. Volume 1 was concerned primarily with developing new technical possibilities for the piano. In contrast，Volume 2 is a set of studies intended to develop aspects of masterworks from the past classical repertory.
Comme les harmonies du soir is a reinterpretation of Liszt’s transcendental study Harmonies du soir involving a timbral approach to the left hand part of the piece. In Toccata I have transformed cyclical structures accompanied by technical features in the manner of Ligeti in the form of a keyboard toccata. Danse Macabre，as in the title of Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem，brings together the Black Death plague that infested medieval Europe with its modern iteration in the form of the Covid pandemic. Crépuscule depicts in a contemporary musical vein the scene conjured up by Debussy’s Brouillards. Liszt described Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie，op.64 as a Fantaisie douloureuse，and the dolorous mood of the original combines in this study with my own compositional style. The final piece in Volume 2 is À la Mozart is an adaptation of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K.576 involving a graft of my own style onto the original piece. The underlying concept of this second volume of studies is thus an estrangement of musical context with recourse to a variety of technical means.