A few words from Axel If you should happen to pass by the Grand Couronne academy of music, especially early in the morning, there’s a good chance that you‘ll see my car in the parking lot; I’ll be busy practicing, most likely alone. But don’t look for me in the afternoon… I’ll my out riding my bicycle. I occasionally come back to practice late at night… They’ll probably in up offering me a job as a caretaker! It’s fun! Whether playing the cello or riding a bike, I repeat the same passage or climb the same hill, without ever tiring of it (on the contrary). Most people don’t understand the meaning of it all. Of course, every artist seeks perfection and that requires a great deal of work. Unfortunately, the quality we attain is not always it direct proportion to the amount of time put in, that would be too simple. Even if there are empty moments when we go laboriously over and over the same passage, we are always striving for creativity, for expression. In the final analysis my work is based on being as sensitive as possible. Knowledge without feeling is pointless. It is often more demanding to be moved by a work than to understand it, even if the two often go together. So, here’s what I do every day: I listen to find out how the works I play resonate within me. In other words, I ask myself what I feel that I can express through music. It’s rather like a chef who plays with the ingredients he has at his disposal to create a dish; a musician tries to juggle with emotions. Then, just like a chef, I have to ask myself how to convey these emotions. To my mind, two things seem important: to listen to yourself and to listen to others. For example, when I start to play, I always take a moment to feel what I want, and it’s not always music, in fact (major, minor, heat, cold, joy, sadness…) and I begin like that, it is what inspires the beginning of my work. When it’s possible, I try to perceive the precise moment when I have to change mood. When I have worked well, time passes quickly and I don’t feel tired or saturated by my music. My intuition would have me think that, as long as I am aware of my own “musical emotional appetite” I should be able to feel, more precisely and clearly, what is likely to touch and move my listeners, without tiring them too much. As you can see, my work is not too unpleasant, quite the opposite… Now for the ‘menu’: It’s quite difficult to make a disc with separate pieces. There is not dramatic progression, as there might be in a sonata for example. One thus has to try and alternate between different musical moods, whilst keeping a certain unity to the whole. Many of the pieces on this recording are melancholy. I believe we all like to ‘bathe’ in this feeling. I find that it is a very complex emotion which marries well with others. I would compare it to an unstable molecule with many possible combinations. French poets, painters and composers of the 19th and 20th centuries have a very characteristic way of associating different emotions, to which I am particularly sensitive. There is often an ambivalence, an ambiguity, even a tension created by an association of adjectives with opposite meanings (for example sad and beautiful, festive and dull in Verlaine’s poem “Clair de lune”, or the indecisive and frivolous attitudes displayed by the characters in Watteau’s painting The Embarkation for Cythera) Inspired by these artists, I have attempted to put together a program which combines sadness, gaiety, elegance, indifference, profundity, lightness… in short, all those feelings which take possession of us and make us the complex beings that we love to observe.