Jean-François Antonioli:|Preludes

With his Well-Tempered Clavier, Johann Sebastian Bach created a musical cosmos spanning all keys – Frédéric Chopin countered this universe with a radically different model in the 24 Préludes which he composed on Majorca: fragments, moments of inspiration, aphorisms. Robert Schumann saw them as “ruins”, Franz Liszt considered them “golden dreams”. Swiss pianist and conductor Jean-Francois Antonioli gives form to these fleeting features on his disc PRELUDES: he explores these pieces not as short introductions, but as dense character pieces – not fragments, but architectural details which give a foretaste of the large-scale. Chopin emphasised how much he had struggled with this work time and again: his compositions give evidence to a cumbersome process of intensification and ever denser structures. Jean-Francois Antonioli also chisels away at the most detailed of nuances: the pianist is known for his obsession with detail which leaves nothing to chance. PRELUDES was recorded at one of the world’s most beautiful concert halls: the exceptional acoustics at the Victoria Hall in Geneva.