French music writer Joël Pagier had a sharp observation about the evocative, poetic aesthetics of French master hyper-pianist Sophie Agnel. Pagier writes that in Song, Agnel’s only third solo album (following Solo, Vand'Oeuvre, 2000, and Capsizing Moments, Emanem, 2009), “the obstinate metamorphoses of the keyboard call forth the monstrous organicity of the glowing steel in the instrument's belly”.
The seven-movement Song was captured during Agnel’s sessions at Instants Chavirés in Montreuil in 2022 and 2024, a venue with which she has enjoyed a long-standing complicity. The classically-trained pianist, who escaped from jazz, transforms the prepared piano with extended, post Johen-Cage techniques into a vivid, vibrating organism. An instrument that sings a set of dramatic poems that begins and ends with the voice of French soprano vocalist Mauricette Millot, orchestrated into a playful but irreverent song.
Agnel has a singular, often radical sonic vision that employs the hyper-piano to sketch abstract, lyrical and sensual textures, always full of unpredictable, suggestive and highly resonant imagination and invention. Song realized this vision in its most refined and highly poetic form. It is a tightrope walk over the piano's vibrant strings, or a profound reading of the infinite sonic possibilities of the modern keyboard. Pagier adds that “despite the modernity of its very conception, Song reveals itself like a private photo album, a wordless story in which moments of life follow one another, where feelings pass through the generations”.
Agnel convinces the listeners to lose familiar preconceptions about what it is to "play the piano" and open their minds to the imaginative musical landscapes where the keyboard is only part of the game. It is an inspiring game, and the listening experience to Song is like reading a fascinating book of poems whose dramatic construction is so addictive that you can't help but turn the pages. Song is a true masterpiece.
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