Simple instructions: take this disc, place it in your player and settle down between your loudspeakers for an hour and fifteen minutes. It’s a journey worth taking!
Difficult to imagine you are listening to only one instrumentalist. Jean-Pierre Peuvion plays the clarinet, all the clarinets, several clarinets at the same time; he is accompanied by electronics, Tibetan bowls and even glass. He also reveals to us the warm, velvety sound of the ‘tarogato’, a wooden instrument of Hungarian origin with a characteristic sound in between that of the clarinet and the saxophone and an instrument that is still used in Romania, mainly for traditional music.
Yet this project is much more than an anthology for the clarinet: the aural texture is fantastically rich, and for a disc featuring a single instrument – or rather a whole family of instruments – these eight pieces are of very great variety. We discover the works of six contemporary Belgian composers with very different styles. Their influences are multiple, from popular song to melodies with an oriental touch, from precisely written, sophisticated stylistic techniques to pieces that incorporate a considerable degree of improvisa-tion and enlist the performer’s creativity.
The cover is a charcoal sketch of a child drawn when listening to Jean-Pierre Peuvion in concert. It shows that so-called contemporary music, often associated with a restricted circle of initiates, is above all music that touches, that inspires, that makes not only adults dream but children too. And indeed, why not invite the whole family on this journey?
