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Being Dantès

WAKAN

Label: HANJI
Released: 2025
Duration: 00:54:04
Views: 74

Tracks

L’Aile d’un rêve (Pierre Fenichel) - Spinning Top (Francesca Han) - Major (Francesca Han) - La Marée (Francesca Han) - Acacias (Fred Pasqua) - Dantès I (Pierre Fenichel) - Dantès II (Pierre Fenichel) - Wakan (Pierre Fenichel) - The Void Ahead (Pierre Fenichel) - Enfant Automne (Francesca Han) - Aldous’ Journey (Pierre Fenichel)

Personnel

WAKAN

band / ensemble / orchestra

Francesca Han

piano

Pierre Fenichel

bass, acoustic

Fred Pasqua

drums

Album Description

South-Korean pianist Francesca Han, French double bassist Pierre Fenichel, and drummer Fred Pasqua combine their unique talents and worlds in WAKAN. 'Being Dantès' is the first fruit of this collaboration: a repertoire of compositions where obvious, familiar melodic lines navigate complex and unique structures. ‘BEING DANTÈS’ Inspired by the first part of Alexandre Dumas's novel, while imprisoned in the Château d'If, Edmond Dantès slowly transforms before being reborn as the Count of Monte Cristo. The trio invites us to a musical experience, a journey through this initiatory process that unfolds in sound. The pieces in the repertoire, which includes a four-movement suite, are conceived as pictures that revisit the decisive moments in the intimate adventure of the walled-up Edmond Dantès. They evoke the tension created when an interiority and an imaginary world are in motion in a motionless, complex, and elusive environment. During his Kafkaesque imprisonment, time expands, each person tells their own story, and reason vacillates: "We must put the mad with the mad." Silence, even the smallest sounds, take on their full significance: the eddies of the waves, the footsteps of the jailers—a sonic topography takes hold, replacing the alternation of days and nights, a new existential dimension takes hold. All the pictures constitute a formal musical exploration (metric, harmonic, architectural, etc.) as well as a variation on the sensory palette of Edmond Dantès. The idea of revisiting this modern and universal myth emerged during the multiple lockdowns of the Covid-19 health crisis.

Album uploaded by Francesca Han