Christophe Coin

Álvaro Teixeira: Everybody knows Christophe Coin, a great cellist who works especially the ancient and classical repertoire, whose interpretations are unmissable, and who is with us as guest director of EUBO. It is a pleasure to welcome you and for me it is a great pleasure to be chatting with you. I have known and admired your work for many years, notably with the Mosaiques Quartet which is a world reference in the interpretation, most particularly, of the Haydn and Beethoven quartets. Did Christophe choose the repertoire for this evening?

Christophe Coin: I was asked to do a repertoire around the Italian baroque and the theme is "Crossing Borders", which is about composers who left their countries to work in others. Haendel is the big absentee this evening as he also left his home country, but on the other hand we bring in lesser known composers like Hallendal, a Dutchman who worked in England among other places and created many beautiful works. We bring others better known such as Locatelli, Geminiani and Vivaldi, the concerto we perform of this composer being one of his lesser known and very rarely performed works. Locatelli's work (Il pianto d' Arianna for violin and strings) is very interesting, being "programmatic music" around "del pianto de Ariana". It is, basically, a repertoire around the Italian "concerto grosso" that shows us its different aspects.

AT For me this repertoire is much more interesting than if it brought us composers and works that we hear regularly. Are you still working with the Mosaiques?

CC Of course. We will soon have twenty years of activity and in September we will record the three quartets by Arriaga, a Basque composer who died in 1926, his centenary being celebrated this year as he was born in 1906 and died prematurely at the age of twenty.

AT So you interpret repertoire other than the ancient and classical.

CC Yes, we play Bartok and Debussy quartets.

AT With gut strings or metal strings?

CC With gut strings. Metal on string instruments is relatively recent. The Bartok and Debussy quartets were performed on instruments with gut strings when they were created. Of course, the bows are different from those used in ancient music...

AT And of contemporary music, have you never thought of interpreting anything?

CC It's not my speciality. However we will probably play a work by Arvo Part.

AT Brrr... Apart from EUBO, do you direct other formations?

CC Yes, I conduct the Ensemble Baroque de Limonges and I am regularly invited to conduct classical and romantic repertoire with conventional orchestras. As a cellist I am usually invited to perform a lot of repertoire beyond the ancient and classical.

AT It's a typical route to go from antique to at least the end of romanticism? It happened with Harnoucourt of whom you were a pupil...

CC Each artist has his own singularity. The diversity of interpretations enriches the possibility of listening to the same works under different readings. I don't think we can speak of typical paths.

AT Christophe Coin: The audience is looking forward to the second part of the concert. Once again it was a great pleasure to be here chatting with an emblematic artist like Christophe.

CC It was also my pleasure.