Contes (Tales)

Contes (Tales) pairs soprano Sandrine Piau with pianist David Kadouch in a wide-ranging exploration of the fairy tale and lullaby as vessels for something far darker than childhood comfort. Moving from Ravel's Cinq mélodies populaires grecques and Debussy through Poulenc's La courte paille to rediscovered works by women composers Louise Didier and Jeanne Bernard — brought to light through Héloïse Luzzati's advocacy work with La Cité des Compositrices — the program closes with Ilse Weber's Wiegala, a lullaby the composer wrote for her son before both were deported to Auschwitz, and Shostakovich's Ophelia's Song, featuring cellist Ophélie Gaillard. In the accompanying conversation with Camille de Rijck, Piau and Kadouch frame the album as the second half of a diptych (following Voyage intime), built around the idea that fairy tales and lullabies are never purely innocent: they are, as Piau puts it, small guiding stones through the forest of our most intimate fears. Both artists trace this back to family history — Kadouch's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who spoke constantly of the family she lost; Piau's grandfather, a Polish survivor who never spoke of his at all — giving the whole program an undertow of inherited nostalgia and unspeakable loss beneath its fairy-tale surface. Recorded at the Salle Colonne in Paris, this is an album where enchantment and dread are never far apart.

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Sandrine Piau, Soprano David Kadouch, Piano