Frédérick Casadesus’s long feature in Libre Journal is one of the most humane portraits published around Kudritskaya’s Couperin record (1001 Notes). It opens forty years after Chernobyl — « at least a hundred dead, thousands threatened » — and immediately ties the pianist’s biography to environmental and human migration.
Born near the Urals, living in Kyiv when the reactor exploded, she later left again through an almost improbable chain of events: a bassoonist sees a torn poster for Soyouz-Tchernobyl, returns home, convinces his choir-director wife, and eight-year-old Natacha boards a bus to France. « We had always spoken about France, but living there was unthinkable. » She thought she had been abandoned; the family in Chalon-sur-Saône proved otherwise.
Casadesus does not romanticise her Ukrainian training: « not completely healthy », built on brutal competition. Kudritskaya adapted — « when I went on stage I was happy, even when my teacher’s face fell » — but a US tour at fifteen, learning competition repertoire on her knees in a bus, taught her something else: « I understood I could give an essential part of myself to the work I played. »
Couperin arrives as poetic metaphor. Pieces like « Le rossignol en amour » and « Les canaris » become a way to speak about birds that can no longer nest in wartime Ukraine — without reducing music to pamphlet. « Should she stay silent? » Casadesus asks. Her answer is quoted in full: « Not taking part in public debate engenders manipulation. Better to say what you think. » Yet she insists: first defend the interpretation of Couperin itself.
The journalist’s final line sticks: « a strange bird who does not lack nerve. » For readers heading to Syros, this article is the biography behind the press clips — why ecology, exile, and baroque ornament belong in the same sentence.
