Jean-Nicolas Diatkine
Schubert
Photo: Olivier Allard
“Jean-Nicolas Diatkine’s determined launch of the opening movement of Chopin’s B-minor Sonata announces a fluid, contrapuntally alert reading.”
Jed Distler, Classics Today
Moments musicaux D. 780
Impromptus D. 899
Hungarian Melody D. 817
Solo Musica SM 551
With his new recording of the Moments musicaux, the Impromptus Op. 90, and the Hungarian Melody, the French pianist Jean-Nicolas Diatkine fulfills a long-held wish: a return to Franz Schubert — a composer he considers existential, alongside Beethoven. Following the Impromptus Op. 142, which he recorded in Berlin in 2016, this album is more than a continuation. It arises — especially in times of social unrest — from a profound need: to rediscover and share essential emotions through Schubert’s piano music.
A humanistic, searching attitude shapes Diatkine’s approach. Listening to Schubert means entering a world of fantasy whose pull neither listener nor performer can resist — this is how Diatkine describes his connection to the composer. His understanding of Schubert is rooted in vocal accompaniment: Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin, Schwanengesang. This work has sharpened his ear for what holds Schubert’s music together at its core: an intimacy that makes every listener feel they carry a deeply personal Schubert within themselves.
Diatkine imagines the first of the six Moments musicaux (D 780) as a graceful dancing couple in a Viennese salon. An unspoken tension fills the air — made palpable by Schubert’s use of hemiolas. This image captures the first piece: a “dream within a dream.” The second begins in five voices, “sung as if on inexhaustible breath.” The third recalls a song without words: Diatkine imagines a Viennese fiaker horse describing its life in harness — until it disappears into the distance.
In the fourth piece, in dark C-sharp minor, he perceives parallels to Täuschung from the Winterreise. A dancing episode in D-sharp major seems to come from far away, making the fate all the more tragic. The fifth becomes a “Scottish dance of wrath”: the piano slips into the role of an imaginary orchestra. The sixth carries the pathos of a troubadour — augmented fifth chords sound like a cry for help before a central episode takes on the character of a religious revelation: death as a moment of light.
The four Impromptus (D 899) can be heard as a large sonata. Diatkine offers a surprising interpretation of the first. Its long diminuendo evokes a march fading into the distance — inspired by Heine’s Two Grenadiers: tragic heroism that does not extinguish even as it fades. In the second, he lets the chains of triplets rush forward like an unstoppable current — a perpetuum mobile that retains transparency despite its speed. In the third, he unfolds a wide-arching melody: a song he allows time to breathe. In the fourth, arpeggiated wave motions meet powerful chords — Mediterranean ease and dramatic gravity enter into dialogue.
Franz Schubert’s Hungarian Melody (D 817) is the shortest piece on the program and at the same time contains the greatest cultural complexity. The B-minor melody, which Schubert supposedly heard from a servant in Hungary in 1824, carries traits of Klezmer and of the music of the Sinti and Roma. Diatkine brings out the free, almost improvisatory rhythms: a rubato that gives the melody space to lament, to dance, and to tell its story. The term “Hungarian” had a different meaning at the time — Liszt called his rhapsodies that because it was not acceptable to acknowledge their Roma origin. Diatkine does not turn this into an academic debate. He simply plays.
Jean-Nicolas Diatkine
Jean-Nicolas Diatkine was born in 1964 in Paris. He comes from a family of physicians and psychoanalysts; his father René was a leading child psychiatrist. He began piano lessons at the age of six with Wilfredo Voguet, followed by studies with Ruth Nye (a student of Claudio Arrau) and the composer Narcis Bonet (a student of Nadia Boulanger), with whom he spent thirteen years studying the architecture of musical works.
He never attended a conservatory. Between 1996 and 2006, Diatkine worked as a répétiteur — an experience that gave his playing its vocal quality. Since 1999 he has performed as a soloist: at the Opéra Bastille, in Ghent — where audiences named him “the most outstanding pianistic discovery in ten years” — and annually since 2011 in Paris’s Salle Gaveau. Diatkine has practiced Buddhism for more than thirty years. He is convinced that music can heal — but only when one plays for the music itself, not for one’s own ego.