French pianist David Kadouch has built a career at the intersection of top-tier musicianship and absurdity. A celebrated soloist and chamber musician, Kadouch is also one of classical music’s sharpest observers of its own culture.
Artist Playbook caught up with Kadouch to talk about the rituals, pressures, perfectionism, and comedy that shape an artist’s life.
“Humor for me is a form of affection”
What has comedy helped you understand about classical music?
Humor, for me, is a form of affection. I don’t laugh at classical music to diminish it. I laugh because I love it enough to see how absurd, tender, neurotic, and deeply human it can be.
Sometimes the healthiest response is to notice the comedy sitting right beside the beauty.
What do non-musicians most misunderstand about life on stage?
Some of us fantasize about the most ordinary things. People imagine the glamour, the stage, the applause. They don’t always imagine that, because we never really had a normal life, some of us fantasize about Excel files, an office at 8 a.m., or a meeting where nobody asks if you play by heart. At least I do. Maybe I’m weird.
What makes a great work different?
The score does not change, but your demands do.
A great piece becomes endless because of the ideal you project onto it. Some works you play better with age, some worse, and sometimes the most innocent-looking music resists you the most.
What does chamber music reveal that flying solo misses?
Alone, you can easily believe you are having metaphysical ideas. In chamber music, you have to test them out loud, and sometimes discover they were not quite as metaphysical as you thought.
What moves us forward is often not a grand leap, but small attempts at being just a tiny bit better.
How do you make the arts accessible without flattening them?
Accessibility does not flatten an idea. In ten seconds of video, I have to find the essence of a joke or a musical problem. That forces me to think more precisely, not less. At its best, accessibility finds the clearest door into complexity. Whether I can explain my job at family dinners is another question.
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