Marc Monnet’s extraordinary musical life has been auspicious from the start: he studied with Kagel and Stockhausen in Cologne, gained attention at the Darmstadt summer school and was awarded a residency at the Villa Medici. The first book of En pièces (2007) is dedicated to François-Frédéric Guy, who premiered the entire collection at the Strasbourg Musica Festival in 2012. A long artistic companionship and a real friendship bind these two artists. François-Frédéric Guy has praised Monnet’s dazzling ability “to push piano techniques to their extreme”, as well as his “freedom of tone”, and his “Schumannian” inspiration in music of “whimsical, even fantastic, and unclassifiable character”. © Odradek Records