Radio mornings are usually background; this one asks for coffee and score. France Musique’s « La Matinale » with Natacha Kudritskaya (episode « Couperin et les oiseaux voyageurs ») threads her 1001 Notes album through a programme built like a suite: not random tracks, but a narrative arc from ornament to meaning.
Hosts and guest discuss how she « picked » among Couperin’s 27 ordres — many pieces, she explains elsewhere, resist the modern piano — until a melancholy dramaturgy emerged: shadow birds, travelling species, fragile ecosystems echoed in baroque titles.
Listeners hear music and speech intertwined: why « Le Rossignol-en-amour » matters when real nightingales lose habitat; how « Les Ombres errantes » mirrors displaced populations; what it means to play French 18th-century intimacy on a Steinway in 2026.
The broadcast situates the album between Paris (Salle Gaveau, 10 April) and summer festivals — Reims Flâneries musicales with the Ukrainian National Symphony, Limoges, then Greece. Syros is part of that map: the festival programmes Kudritskaya because her work sounds like our island summers — concentrated, communal, politically aware without losing poetry.
Use this link for the full morning; it is the gentlest entry point to her world before reading the harder interviews (We demain, Crescendo).
