"It is a jewelry box, a cabinet of curiosities where one might note, for example, ‘song as the alpha and omega, a seismograph of the soul."
Camille De Rijck
La libre Belgique
"Short, tenderly evocative pieces that all musically suspend the sense of time, nourished by the warmth of the sound and the rich, full-bodied roundness that emanates from Laurianne Corneille’s piano. One senses a deep longing for well-being, but also for peace—that sense of wonder we must evoke to give meaning to all this passing time that will soon leave us by the wayside.”
Pierre Solot
RTBF
“I’ve always had a soft spot for Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe, a farewell song stripped of all romantic bombast, a twilight enigma composed at a time when the musician – in the same era as Hugo – was turning the tables in the hope of conversing with the Afterlife. Music of withering, of fracture, of shattered impulses, which skims the abyss and moves one to the core. The version I’m discovering today by Laurianne Corneille, on her beautiful concept album (and I say this without irony) *L’Hermaphrodite* (Klarthe Records), immediately takes its place in my personal pantheon, alongside the versions by Reine Gianoli, Andreas Staier and Jean Martin. All the more so as the Kreisleriana that accompany it are cut from the same cloth, and the way the programme is structured around Liszt’s transcription of the lied Widmung invites a fascinating exploration of the notions of reconstruction and resilience.”
Pierre Brévignon
Writer, author of biographies of Samuel Barber (Hermann, 2012) and the Group of Six (Actes Sud, 2020)
“The unpredictability of Schumann’s style – with its mood swings, its contrasts that defy all logic, and its alluring sensuality that one refuses to succumb to – infuses Laurianne Corneille’s performance.”
Stéphane Friederich
Resmusica
“Laurianne Corneille has thus produced an album that proves to be a personal and intimate musical testimony: an artist through and through, she knows how to choose her words and images just as she chooses her sounds.”
Jany Campello
Con Spirito
“There is perhaps a touch more fragility than reverie in Laurianne Corneille’s performance. […] The close-up recording of Laurianne Corneille’s piano playing is no doubt a factor in this. But one also senses a deeply personal commitment in the pianist’s playing, a driving force that at times borders on despair or melancholy.”
Joël Chevassus
Audiophile Magazine
‘The performance is at times surprising in its structure and nuances, but always poignant, imbued with a profound musicality and underpinned by Neuhaus’s robust, Moguilevsky-influenced style and the resonant tone of Claire Chevallier.’
Martine Mergeay
La Libre Belgique
‘Laurianne Corneille […] demonstrating […] a powerful expressive force that in no way overshadows her extreme sensitivity.’
" Finally, it is also worth noting the fine groundwork laid by Laurianne Corneille to broaden horizons, with bonus material drawing on texts by Roland Barthes as well as an exploration of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which mends what has been broken…'
Lexnews
"Laurianne Corneille, a French pianist whose playing is astonishingly elegant, presents an album entitled *Hermaphrodite* (Klarthe label). Here, a Schumann of multiple identities is revealed to us. The imbalance – so often emphasised in a musical teleology that no one should have to put up with any longer – gives way to song, almost to joy. May Laurianne Corneille accompany music-loving readers who are passionate about novelty, invention and sensuality."
Frédérick Casadesus
Mediapart
"Laurianne Corneille’s deeply moving recital, entitled ‘L’Hermaphrodite’, brings together deeply moving pieces, ranging from extreme darkness to revealing clarity. The emotions and feelings conveyed through broken chords are of an almost indecent beauty. These harmonies, so pleasing to the ear, are a pain in the soul for this composer, who was so deeply immersed in his emotions as dawn approached."
Classique HD
“Schumann with a matter-of-fact approach A Schumann CD by Klarthe is entitled L’Hermaphrodite, and on it Laurianne Corneille performs Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133, and the Kreisleriana, Op. 16. Brilliant technique and serious musicality do justice to these scores, audibly driven by a determination to avoid anything sentimental or dramatic. This is an uncomplicated, unsentimental approach that favours objectivity over Romantic rapture.”
Rémy Fanck
Pizzicato
"By embracing for herself the deceptively complex contrasts of Schumann’s music, Laurianne Corneille finds that ‘golden thread’ which unifies the various directions, balances the tensions and continually enriches her own inner experience; this is what makes Schumann’s works—which reveal a creative journey—by no means instinctive or hasty, but rather thoughtful and masterfully controlled, conscious and fully embraced. What has been tested, broken and grasped is reunited… indeed ‘sublimated’ according to the Japanese aesthetic of kintsugi, that art which repairs broken ceramics and gives them a new lease of life (see the very personal liner notes accompanying the CD). In Schumann’s work, this journey between two shores becomes a source of healing. It is at once redemptive and restorative. A luminous and intimate achievement."
Hugo Pabst
Classiquenews
“Frenzied with an olympian calm, Apollonian and Dionysian, both Eusébius and Florestan….Rarely has Schumann’s piano sounded with such poetry and ease, as in the hands of Laurianne Corneille."
Karol Beffa
Pianist, composer and musicologist.
“Laurianne Corneille possesses the perfect touch, an extreme sensitivity and an individual sense of space in time which allows her to offer, throughout this superb Schumann recording, a long journey passing from deepest contemplation to soaring and searing lyrical lines.”
Gabriel Le Magadure
Quator Ebène
“In this age of consumerisation of ephemeral artists, Laurianne Corneille offers us her extraordinary sensitivity and sincerity. An act which would have seemed natural a few decades ago, but which has become a rarity today."
Mathieu Franot
Les Frivolités Parisiennes
“There is, in the playing style of Laurianne Corneille, a hidden crack which all of a sudden, takes us directly to the composer, showing him in a situation of exceptional intimacy. In lugubrious Düsseldorf, the “absent heat” is sat at his piano, bent over “the songs of dawn”. Pieces that are “difficult to understand”, of a “really very strange” tone, in the words of Clara Schumann. “Resilience” , “serene sky” in the hands of Laurianne Corneille.”
Jacques Perry-Salkow
Author of "Anagrammes à quatre mains. Une histoire vagabonde des musiciens et de leurs œuvres", with Karol Beffa, Actes Sud, 2018
“Laurianne Corneille is a moving and refined pianist and I am constantly impressed by her great innate feeling for the music, always practiced with integrity, intelligence and overwhelming musicality”.
Alain Lefèvre
Pianist
