HRADCANY
 
Some music is meant to be danced to, it gives you pins and needles in the legs and knocks you out of your chair. Hradcany's music does much more: it’s not only music to dance to, but music that dances! Rhythm that splits for a few seconds, an, ornament that blossoms into an ending phrase and suddenly we hear an entrechat, a leap, a spin…. From the Northern Carpathian mountains to Turkey, music from a mass of different cultures grazes, influences, turns around each other... It's from these various sources that Serge Adam, David Venitucci and Philippe Botta are nourished. For fifteen years now, they make up their own traditions, compose in reference to one or the other, travel, marveling in the crescent that extends from Eastern Europe to the Ottoman lands. Thus, their music is infinitely diverse.
The color is at times more oriental when Philippe Botta abandons his saxophones to take the ney, when the intervals are a little less temperate, or when the trio invites the daf of Francois Verly.
 

Or sometimes it is more Balkan, it links asymmetrical steps, superimposed melodic fragments that respond from one floor to another. The trumpet or the accordion alternatively give the rhythm of the structure, and each one in its turn flies in a whirlwind solo. But despite the instrumentalists’ personality and virtuosity, it's the overall sound that we’re drawn to : this unique and warm mixture, these three breaths that twine and interweave to give us this bouquet that we recognize. And what a pleasure to enter into a universe so complicated! The complex meters, the woven virtuosity, the sound tampering follow each other...and yet it sounds easy! This music that is so difficult to play delivers without reluctance and without restraint: we go there with simple and delicious pleasure.

Yvan Amar (09-2017)