Interview, Bertrand Chamayou on Good Night!

Having found myself echoing Semele’s lament ‘O sleep, why dost thou leave me?’ rather more often than usual over the past few unsettling months, Bertrand Chamayou’s Good Night! - an eclectic and beguiling collection of lullabies by composers including Alkan, Lyapunov, Mel Bonis and Balakirev – has been a real source of comfort and joy since its release on Erato in October. I was delighted to have the opportunity to thank the French pianist (a self-described fellow insomniac!) over the phone recently, and to find out more about how his first ‘concept album’ took shape…

This seems like a very timely album, given how many of us have found ourselves struggling with insomnia this year: was that sheer coincidence, or did you discover some of this music in lockdown?

It’s a project that’s been in the works for a very long time – it was purely by chance that it turned out to be the perfect lockdown album! For some reason I’ve just loved lullabies since childhood, but of course it’s not just a genre for kids: Chopin and the other Romantics create this marvellous magical sound in the high register of the piano, and that crystalline softness is something that will always bewitch me. The piano repertoire has some of the most marvellous examples, and the idea of doing a complete programme of them somehow lodged itself in my brain.

Two things were really the catalyst for making it happen: first of all, having children of my own. I’d played them a few lullabies from my collection, but when I looked for some nice playlists for them on Spotify it was always the same old chestnuts - The Swan, Massenet’s Méditation etc – and very little in the way of solo piano pieces. That got me thinking about streaming and concept albums…I’d never recorded a concept-album before, and rather than doing something super-commercial and predictable I thought it would be interesting to theme it around a genre and include new discoveries and little jewels. Once I really got started I found so much potential material: I could’ve done at least three albums, but I thought I’d start with one!

The recording was made two weeks before lockdown, on my own piano – and that turned into a bit of a saga because once the restrictions came into place it couldn’t be transported back from the studio. I eventually got it back in May, but for two months I didn’t have access to an instrument at all!

How did you spend that enforced time away from the piano?

Well, with two little kids it was more a question of ‘How did I find any time?'!. Aside from editing and mixing the album, most of my lockdown was spent playing with them. I also worked on a lot of new musical projects without touching a piano, and it was good for the muscles and brain to rest a little from practising. But I’m back giving concerts now and I’m lucky enough to have plenty of work coming up, so things are pretty good.

What’s special about the piano you used for this recording?

It’s a Steinway grand which I bought three years ago, and my goal was to use it for all my future recordings. Being able to work at home with a piano technician before going into the studio is such a luxury, because it’s really important for me to try and find a special sound for each album: normally we get an instrument that’s been played by many other artists for many other projects, and you have one or two days at best to transform the sound a little bit before you record. But this time around we spent nearly two months working on the sort of soft, tender sonorities I wanted for this programme, and I’m pretty happy with how it’s come off on the recording!

You mentioned the distinctive use of the higher register of the piano in this music – what other similarities do you see across these lullabies in terms of how composers write for the instrument?

Initially it felt a little strange to spend so much of a programme in the upper register of the keyboard: when very low notes do happen, it’s usually because the lullaby is temporarily morphing into something else. (The Balakirev is a good example: the funeral march section in the middle is actually a nightmare that interrupts the lullaby). But there are two other main things that give the lullaby its special hypnotic quality: rhythm and dynamics. You have very few opportunities to play forte in this music - 90% of the time it’s very soft, and the challenge is to create a whole palette of colours even without strong dynamic contrasts. Melody is also very important, of course: everything has to really sing, but with that intimate quality of singing under the breath. That, for me, was the difficulty of the album – it’s easy to become frustrated when everything has to be so soft and slow, but it was ultimately so rewarding to discover all the possibilities within this fairly narrow scale of dynamics and tempo.

It’s similar with the rhythm: it has to be so very regular, and again that can feel disconcerting when you’re used to playing repertoire that involves a lot of pulling back or pushing ahead! The big Liszt piece on the album does have a lot of cadences and places where you break out of the meter a little, but even there it’s still so important that each chord is balanced with the one before: you can’t have any bumps in the road. So it’s really about how to create different moods and feelings within all of these limitations: the challenge is to fit as much colour and variety as possible into such a restrained space, and that was something I found incredibly interesting to work on.

Do you find streaming services a helpful tool when it comes to exploring new repertoire?

Yes and no. Of course it’s great that you can discover new music so easily, and I think that’s working very well for pop, but when it comes to classical repertoire there’s still so much that’s missing on streaming services: there’s a lot to be done on that front, and I’m ready and willing to be a part of it! I still do most of my discovery the old-fashioned way, buying a lot of scores and sight-reading to find new treasures - but they deserve to be brought to streaming platforms and to physical albums, and I hope I’ll get more opportunities to do that.

The way we consume music has altered so radically in such a short space of time. I’m not yet forty, but sometimes I feel like I’m very much ‘the older generation’: we grew up without social media or the internet, and I didn’t even get my first mobile until I was in my twenties! When I was a kid I just had a few albums and they were like treasure to me – I must have listened to them literally thousands of times, and they’re part of my identity and musical personality nowadays. Today we’re faced with this ocean of possibilities, and the danger is that we only ever skim the surface without taking the time to dive deeper, which I do find a bit troubling. But at the same time having access to so many things is exactly what I dreamed of as a kid.

How much of the programme did you learn specifically for this project?

I’d say roughly 20% of the music was entirely new to me. The Janáček was something I’d played a lot already, but always as part of the complete cycle: I never envisaged it belonging on a concept-album, but here we are! And the Liszt pieces were favourites too: in fact I played the second one for my first kid so much that he used to call it ‘Papa’s music’! But the Lyapunov was a discovery, as were the pieces by Villa-Lobos, Grieg and Mel Bonis, a really marvellous French female composer. The Lachenmann was something I knew well, and I was very keen to include it here because it’s the kind of music people are sometimes wary of approaching: it provides a great contrast, and listeners who might not sit down with a complete Lachenmann album will hopefully find it easier to digest in this context. For me the scariest piece here is Martinů’s Berceuse: it’s technically a lullaby, but it’s more like horror-film music! And as soon as I came across Alkan’s ‘J’étais endormie’ I knew I wanted that to be the final track on the album – it’s very beautiful, like you’re falling totally asleep.

How did the Bryce Dessner commission come about?

I wanted to have one completely new piece for this project, as everything else is from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: even the Lachenmann is from the 1960s and that’s quite abstract, so I thought something more minimalist would work well. I’ve known Bryce well for a while, although we’d never worked together before this; we have some plans to collaborate on perhaps a piano concerto or a larger-scale solo piano piece… His son Octave is the same age as one of mine, and I thought it would be nice if he wrote something for him that could also work on the album; he ended up writing a few lullabies, and he and his wife selected this one for Good Night!. If I do end up extending this project I’d like to commission much more, but for now I think one was a good start!

You’ve included music from a wide range of countries here: do you get the sense that Northern European composers like Grieg and Lyapunov depict night quite differently from someone like Villa-Lobos who hails from warmer climes?

I think so. The Russian lullabies in particular have a certain kind of colour in common, but I don’t know whether it’s to do with the way they treat lullabies specifically or just the identity of the music itself. But there are some moments which have a strong national character: the middle section of the Grieg, for example, has an elfish quality that’s so typical of Nordic music. From the outset I was keen to include music from a range of countries and periods: I wanted to create a kind of mosaic of different feelings and nationalities. But the lullaby also represents something which is common to the whole of humanity: this moment where you go to bed and try to sleep, which is much easier for some people than it is for others. Personally I’m a total insomniac, but I think everybody has periods where they experience anxiety either right before sleep or during the night. It’s something that’s familiar to us all from childhood, and that universal quality was part of what attracted me to this project.

What works for you when it comes to dealing with insomnia?

So far I’ve never found anything that levels it out completely: yoga and meditation help, but it’s not enough. I think it’s all linked to the pressure I put myself under for work and concerts: I’ve pushed myself too hard since childhood, and it’s something I’m trying to fix. The only thing that works 100% is holidays - when I’m on vacation I always sleep very well, and during lockdown I was the same.