Les Grands Entretiens

Les Grands Entretiens is a France Musique series built for the long view. Each portrait lets a musician or conductor move through the stages, works, and inner arguments that shaped an artistic life. The pace is deliberately measured. Rather than extracting quick anecdotes, the conversations return to specific evidence: a childhood teacher, a class, an album cover, a repertoire choice, a debut, an orchestra encountered years later. The recent Yom chapters are especially rich in this method. They trace the clarinet from childhood discipline into a more private language, one that family analysis could not easily decode. Klezmer appears not as a decorative style but as a tradition marked by rupture, renewal, debt, and the need to decide how much reverence can coexist with reinvention. Yom’s route passes through Orient Express Moving Shnorers, solo work, jazz’s openness to difficult labels, and albums that test the boundary between composition, fantasy, and self-exposure. The show allows those tensions to remain complicated. A conversation can move from the destruction of a musical tradition in Europe to a deliberately extravagant record sleeve, then back to the question of why a musician keeps searching. It is serious, but not airless. There is room for dry comedy, as when a spiritual symbol turns out to be a plastic garden-store Buddha. There is also room for gravity, especially when exile, Judaism, meditation, trance, and the wish to transmit energy through sound come into view. The Semyon Bychkov episode brings the same patience to conducting. Mozart, Aix-en-Provence, French music, Dutilleux, opera, the Paris Orchestra, and generational change become ways to ask what expression demands from musicians now. The conversations are guided, but not overcontrolled. Guests are given space to follow associations until craft becomes biography and biography becomes a larger artistic question. Les Grands Entretiens is best approached as close listening in interview form. It is for people who want music discussed through memory, discipline, repertoire, and doubt, with enough precision to satisfy the informed listener and enough warmth to keep the portrait human.