Barricades

Jean Rondeau: “Both of us have grown up with this music from the cradle of our earliest infancy; […] It is music that allowed us to become what we are, while at the same time encouraging us to question things constantly. […] Now, playing the music – because, as we all know, we play rather than make music – has become a part that each of us plays, played here as a double act. Each one for himself, with his instrument as a crucible, and at the same time each of us for the other, since after all we are engaged in a performance. We don’t know how to play alone. This is the paradox of the game of music: a cross between extremely precise rules for how to play – how to read this cryptic language we spend our life deciphering, like hieroglyphs – and the magic to which it leads us – its at once organic and dreamlike dimension. This is where we find our shared expression: in a shared ordeal, we still don’t fully understand. […] Our playing goes far beyond dialogue: for us, it is not about responding to each other so much as it is about questioning and inviting our listeners to join us in this exploration with no answer or resolution. […] So we brood over this music, we play it endlessly, and we play endlessly. That is precisely what we do in this programme composed almost exclusively of rondos (refrain–verse–refrain–verse), and pieces with repeats in binary form.”