®Jean-Baptiste-Millot
Dominique Pifarély -violin
Francois Couturier -piano
New ECM release on January 24, 2025
François Couturier and Dominique Pifarély, defining figures in creative music in France, renew their special connection on Preludes and Songs, an album of sensitive interaction, improvisational flair, and wide ranging artistic reference. Almost three decades have elapsed since the last ECM album by the pianist and violinist (Poros, recorded in 1997), and although there have been shared musical adventures in the interim, this recording amounts to a reassessment and realignment of their duo work : “The idea was not to go back to where we first stopped,” Dominique Pifarély explains, “but to start from the point that each of us had reached during this long pause. Therefore we had to really pay attention to each other’s musical personality, since we had built different ideas and forms meanwhile. We absolutely wanted to respect each other’s route, and find a passage to each other.”
A poetic sensibility, then, irradiates much of Preludes and Songs, but not all its allusions are literary.
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Review:
A duo of discreet giants, two musicians who have been essential to the music world for decades and who never take the easy way out, it’s inevitable that when they get together, they make an essential record. Whether offering their original compositions or covers of Ellington, Gershwin, J.J Johnson and even Brel, their voices speak to each other and intermingle in the service of the themes played with the expressive humanity that characterises them. Their shared musical background is such that nothing stands in the way of their alchemy, nothing interferes with their desire for absolute beauty. …. In this recording, you won’t be listening to music by one musician for another, which can be tragically boring, whatever the merits of the artists. In Preludes and Songs, François Couturier and Dominique Pifarély offer you a space of communion where those who still believe, with Yves Bonnefoy, that poetry can save the world, can come together.