Placed under the aegis of Chiaroscuro, the juxtaposition of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frédéric Chopin leads to an observation: At 22, Bella Schütz displays a height of vision that most pianists acquire only after two or three decades of experience. Yet her borrowing of a term from the pictorial realm designating contrasts of light seems less obvious, not to say obscure, in view of a program full of nuance.

Whatever the young Frenchwoman's imaginative aspirations, her interpretation is a revelation – not only for herself, but also for the works of the two composers she has wisely brought together on the basis of fantasy, of expression sensitive to the moment and, beyond that, to improvisation. Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903, masterfully opens the ambitious recital. Schütz immediately impresses with a sound that seems to synthesize the different keyboard instruments available to the Baroque master, combining the fluidity of the fortepiano, the sharpness of the harpsichord, and the smoothness of the organ.

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