Vanessa Wagner: Between Boundaries

Vanessa Wagner’s musical universe has grown from her intense curiosity as a musician and listener. “I have been playing erudite Classical, Romantic and contemporary piano music for years,” the French pianist and composer tells Apple Music Classical. “But I have always listened to a wide variety of musical styles, from Baroque to ambient electronic music.” For Wagner, however, musical boundaries are there to be crossed, and it’s that indefinable expanse between genres and styles that most fascinates her. “It’s where musical worlds become porous to each other, nourished by diverse influences,” says Wagner. “It’s where space-time is different—it has become for me a terrain of expression and exploration.” The music featured in this playlist defies categorisation, its composers feeding off myriad influences in their quest for the new. With her Gotham Lullaby, for instance, US composer Meredith Monk overlays a simple piano, almost pop accompaniment with soaring, wordless vocals that seem to spring from the natural world. “When I listen to this piece,” says Wagner, “I feel like I’m hearing something from the deepest part of the feminine soul, of infinite tenderness and great power.” There’s an almost primeval beauty to Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, too, a suite of pieces inspired by the American artist’s profoundly contemplative canvases. “Feldman is the musician of silence and stillness,” says Wagner. “When you listen, time no longer takes hold. I was overwhelmed with emotion when I first heard this fifth movement.” We traverse the world of minimalism, too, in the company of Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt and Bryce Dessner, whose Murder Ballades teem with quirky spontaneity and rhythmic life. And minimalist techniques take centre stage in Michael Gordon’s joyous, swirling Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a piece that plays with and bends Beethoven’s musical motifs to dizzying effect. “The power of the original is there,” adds Wagner, “but Gordon manages to make something completely different without losing its essence.”