Inspired by Alexander Ekman’s ballet Play, this journey invites you to discover how the spirit of play leaps from the stage to the score, carried by humor, imagination, and surprise.
What happens when music decides to play itself? When gravity gives way to mischief, when the composer becomes a magician, the performer a trickster, and the listener a wide-eyed child laughing, and marveling anew.
From Rossini to Shostakovich, from Django Reinhardt to Oscar Peterson, this selection brings together works where playfulness is the driving force: imitation, diversion, pastiche, virtuosity, and swing. Saint-Saëns’s animals pull faces at us, Bernstein bounds across Broadway like a kid unleashed, Django improvises elusive arabesques, Art Tatum turns the piano into a skating rink, and Ella Fitzgerald transforms nursery rhymes into gleeful scat.
This playlist is a carefree stroll - but not an innocent one: it reminds us that for a musician, playing is anything but trivial. It’s a burst of freedom, a space for mischief, surprise, dialogue, and childhood rediscovered. What if the best way to listen were simply... to play at listening?
