Some performances need a velvet curtain; this one needs a departure board. In the press material shared by Agence Résonances, Natacha Kudritskaya is filmed at Paris’s Gare de Lyon — not on a concert stage, but at a public piano, playing François Couperin’s « Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou Les Maillotins ».
The piece is a masterpiece of wit: mechanical rhythm, ornamental sparkle, the illusion of two hands chasing each other like clockwork. To hear it between train announcements is to understand Kudritskaya’s project in a single gesture: baroque music is not museum dust, it can live wherever people pause.
The title itself is a program: « tic-toc », « choc » — percussion of time, collision of accents. On a upright or semi-public instrument, the challenge is not only musical but acoustic: clarity of articulation, control of resonance, the Couperinian jeu that her new 1001 Notes album explores at length.
This video belongs to the same Couperin season as her France Musique mornings, her Libre Journal profile, and her resistance-themed interviews: birds, migration, fragility — but here the message is lighter, almost mischievous. Baroque as surprise, offered to travellers who did not book a ticket.
Watch via the source link (add the exact YouTube URL in Studio when you have it from the agency). Then listen to the full album: the same composer, deeper dramaturgy — and, in July, her concerts on Syros, where the festival welcomes an artist who refuses to separate stage poetry from civic speech.
