Alain Roche (born in 1973) is a pianist, composer, and Swiss performer, recognized for his innovative performances in the field of contemporary music. He is particularly known for his Piano Vertical project.
Alain Roche performs his "piano vertical", playing on a grand piano suspended in the air. Since 2013, more than 120 piano suspensions under the name "Les ciels" (The Skies) have taken place in various countries, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, France, Austria, Germany, and China. The pianist plays even in rain, at temperatures between five and 40 degrees, and in winds up to 72km/h.[1][2][3][4][5] A special mechanism returns the keys to their original position after being pressed.[6] The audience listens to the concert through headphones.
Alain Roche began his musical training at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, where he specialized in musical creation for theater and dance. Starting in 2013, he gained recognition with his revolutionary project, the Piano Vertical, where he plays the piano suspended in the air.[7]
Career
The Piano Vertical project began in 2013 and quickly attracted attention across Europe. Roche plays his grand piano suspended several meters above the ground, often in urban or natural settings, transforming the act of playing the piano into a complete physical and artistic performance. This approach is praised for its originality and impact on the contemporary music scene.[8]
In 2019, he launched the Chantier project, where he integrates sounds captured on construction sites into his performances. This project was presented at festivals such as Lieu Unique in Nantes and further solidified his reputation as an avant-garde artist.[9]
Between 2023 and 2024, he performed a series of 182 morning performances as part of his project **Solstice to Solstice**, played in Munich between the winter solstice and the summer solstice. These concerts, given at dawn, combine music with the sounds of nature.[10]
Alain Roche regularly collaborates with dancer and choreographer Stéphanie Boll, with whom he founded the Boll & Roche company in 2012. Together, they explore the interactions between music and movement in innovative stage creations.[11]
Artur Schnabel was an Austrian-American classical pianist, composer and pedagogue. Schnabel was known for his intellectual seriousness as a musician, avoiding pure technical bravura. Among the 20th century's most respected and important pianists, his playing displayed marked vitality, profundity and spirituality in the Austro-German classics, particularly the works of Beethoven and Schubert.
A prepared piano is a piano that has had its sounds temporarily altered by placing bolts, screws, mutes, rubber erasers, and/or other objects on or between the strings. Its invention is usually traced to John Cage's dance music for Bacchanale (1940), created for a performance in a Seattle venue that lacked sufficient space for a percussion ensemble. Cage has cited Henry Cowell as an inspiration for developing piano extended techniques, involving strings within a piano being manipulated instead of the keyboard. Typical of Cage's practice as summed up in the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) is that each key of the piano has its own characteristic timbre, and that the original pitch of the string will not necessarily be recognizable. Further variety is available with use of the una corda pedal.
Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy is a Russian solo pianist, chamber music performer, and conductor. Born in the Soviet Union, he has held Icelandic citizenship since 1972 and has been a resident of Switzerland since 1978. Ashkenazy has collaborated with well-known orchestras and soloists. In addition, he has recorded a large repertoire of classical and romantic works. His recordings have earned him seven Grammy Awards and Iceland's Order of the Falcon.
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy. He is often considered the main Russian symbolist composer and a major representative of the Russian Silver Age.
Paul Sacher was a Swiss conductor, patron and billionaire businessman. At the time of his death Sacher was majority shareholder of pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche and was considered the third richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of US$13 billion.
Maurizio Pollini was an Italian pianist and conductor. He was known for performances of Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and the Second Viennese School, among others. He championed works by contemporary composers, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Benjamin, Roberto Carnevale, Gianluca Cascioli and Bruno Maderna. Several compositions were written for him, including Luigi Nono's ... sofferte onde serene ..., Giacomo Manzoni's Masse: omaggio a Edgard Varèse, and Salvatore Sciarrino's Fifth Sonata. As a conductor he was instrumental in the Rossini revival at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, conducting La donna del lago from a new critical edition in 1981. He also conducted from the keyboard.
Alfred Denis Cortot was a French pianist, conductor, and teacher who was one of the most renowned classical musicians of the 20th century. A pianist of massive repertory, he was especially valued for his poetic insight into Romantic piano works, particularly those of Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and Schumann. For Éditions Durand, he edited editions of almost all piano music by Chopin, Liszt and Schumann.
Friedrich Gulda was an Austrian pianist and composer who worked in both the classical and jazz fields.
Evgeny Igorevich Kissin is a Russian-born concert pianist and composer. He became a British citizen in 2002 and an Israeli citizen in 2013. He first came to international fame as a child prodigy. He has a wide repertoire and is especially known for his interpretations of the works of the Romantic era, particularly those of Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Modest Mussorgsky and Ludwig van Beethoven. He is commonly viewed as a great successor of the Russian piano school because of the depth, lyricism and poetic quality of his interpretations.
Lang Lang is a Chinese pianist who has performed with major orchestras around the world and appeared at many leading concert halls. Active since the 1990s, he was the first Chinese pianist to be engaged by the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and many of the top American orchestras. In 2000, a Chicago Tribune music critic called him "the biggest, most exciting young keyboard talent I have encountered in many a year of attending piano recitals."
Ralph Towner is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger and bandleader. He plays the twelve-string guitar, classical guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion, trumpet and French horn.
The Fantasy on Themes from Mozart's Figaro and Don Giovanni, S.697, is an operatic paraphrase for solo piano by Franz Liszt, based on themes from two different Mozart's operas: The Marriage of Figaro, K.492 and Don Giovanni, K.527.
Karl Ulrich Schnabel was an Austrian pianist. Schnabel was the son of pianist Artur Schnabel and operatic contralto and lieder singer Therese Behr and elder brother of the American actor Stefan Schnabel. An internationally celebrated teacher of the piano, his students include, among others, Leon Fleisher, Claude Frank, Richard Goode, Kwong-Kwong Ma, Stanislav Ioudenitch, Jon Nakamatsu, Murray Perahia, and Peter Serkin.
See Siang Wong is a Swiss-Malaysian pianist.
Marc Raubenheimer was a South African pianist.
Anastasia Rizikov is a Canadian classical pianist.
Yuja Wang is a Chinese pianist. Born in Beijing, she began learning piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Charlie Albright is an American pianist and composer. He is an official Steinway Artist, 2014 Avery Fisher Career Grant Recipient, 2010 Gilmore Young Artist (2010) and former Young Concert Artist. He graduated from Harvard College (AB) and the New England Conservatory (MM) as the first classical pianist in the schools' five-year AB/MM Joint Program, was named the Leverett House Artist in Residence for 2011–2012, and was one of the 15 Most Interesting Seniors of the Harvard College Class of 2011. He graduated from the Juilliard School of Music with his post-graduate Artist Diploma (AD) in 2014.
Ji Liu was born 1990 and is a Chinese concert pianist, recording artist, and published composer currently based in London.
"Gesang der Geister über den Wassern" is a 1779 poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). It may be best known in the English-speaking world through a musical setting of 1820–21 by Franz Schubert (1797–1828) as a part song for men's voices and low strings (D.714).
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