Refined, sensual, by turns impetuous or hypnotic, Sandrine Piau’s singing is like a look at the world. At 56, the French soprano never stops radiating these luminous spun highs that are her signature, her voice hovering high over the sound, before the wing beat of the vibrato. “As we were born to die and we’re going to end up below, I’ve always tried to go towards weightlessness, to escape by taking flight. »
A blunt statement, a small glass of Cheverny in hand, in her small Parisian kitchen, avenue de la République, between two round trips to Marseille, the city where she settled with her husband and two children there. years ago, long before Marseille was fashionable.
Sandrine Piau was first of all a harpist in her first life. An instrument discovered thanks to the irresistible Duchess of Aristocats, by Walt Disney. The parents of the sick little girl, transplanted at three years old for a vesico-renal problem, and who neither walked nor talked before that age, had been advised to find her a center of interest to distract her from her fragile health. . The fruitful meeting with Maïté Etcheverry, at the conservatory of Issy-les-Moulineaux (city where Sandrine Piau was born on June 5, 1965), then with Brigitte Sylvestre, very involved in contemporary music, will naturally lead the teenager to the class of harpist Marie-Claire Jamet, at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris. She will obtain a Second Prize there in 1988.
Sandrine Piau loves this instrument of chiaroscuro, a state she cherishes, between lyricism and strangeness, horror and enchantment. But the song is already there. “I stopped getting sick when I started studying Radio-France at the age of ten, she confides. The voice healed me. I developed from there a real health. » A treasure that Sandrine Piau has always preserved, accepting, not without regret, the passage of time.
“I don’t want to make myself unhappy with things that are inevitable., she sighs. I don’t refuse to change, let the voice change. But I don’t accept pain. That’s why I recently strengthened the gym, swimming. You can’t do fifty facelifts like the Bogdanoffs. »
text lover
The singer does not have enough tender words for her record company, Alpha Classics, with which she has made at least three recordings since the start of the pandemic, in the face of confinement. Yes Lovescapes brings together a collective of artists on the contemporary music of Johan Farjot and the poems of David Tepfer, the other, Enchantresses, marks her elective affinities with Händel, a repertoire where she has masterfully imposed herself. “I had a great crush on his music but also an intense physical pleasure in singing it, she enthuses, to the point of sometimes having the impression that he wrote for me and that there is a bond between us over the centuries. »
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