Utopian Wind / Solo

« Pascal Contet plays the accordion. This is untrue. It’s his accordion that sings, shouts, blows, cries, groans, laughs, gasps, whistles or whispers. After a concert by Pascal Contet, the audience is unanimous:  there is no other instrument owning a musical palette that can give birth to such a variety of tones and colors, and that evolves with such ease in musical ranges as diverse as popular music, gypsy-jazz, tango, classical music – and first of all in that of contemporary music.
Pascal Contet denies getting caught up in any cleavage, whether technical or stylistic. As soon as the first chords cling, he thrills his audience and drags it into his very own world of sound. More than once one wonders how he manages to extract all these amazing sounds and effects from his instrument. During his concerts he strolls from Johann Sebastian Bach to Franz Schubert, passing by Domenico Scarlatti, from Astor Piazzolla to composers such as Luciano Berio, Jean Françaix or Arne Nordheim. Current composers like Franck Bedrossian, Bernard Cavanna, Ivan Fedele, Philippe Hurel, Bruno Mantovani, Marc Monnet or Yann Robin  amongst others have dedicated creations to him. And when Pascal Contet improvises, all boundaries between the different musical genres are abolished. »
Hans-Joachim Gögl, translated by Geneviève Karlsson

Like breathing…
« Pascal Contet’s accordion-playing, as light, compact, and indispensable as breathing itself, invents space through a kind of consonantal and vocalic alliteration. Without artifice. Pascal Contet’s perfect synthesis of rich inventiveness and accessible modernity, is an imaginative, new, composite and magical approach to the accordion, revealed here as light, compact and indispensable as air and breathing. »
David Jisse – Radio France, translated by Jeffrey Grice