111 is the number of popular pieces that Cyprien Katsaris has assembled in the service of his one thousand and one fingers to lead us on a tour of the world illumined by his manual pyrotechnics. Over six hours of music embracing every age and every genre: the originality of this feast is that it is not confined to classical orthodoxy but rather opens windows on to territory that the ayatollahs of strict classicism would prefer to anathematise. Thus, to a Bach Prelude will respond a dance from West Side Story or an aria from Carmen! Why? Because music belongs to everyone, because music is made for everyone, because music should be able to bring pleasure to everyone.

These five CDs invite us to discover the various facets of the talents of Cyprien Katsaris: he is, of course, a virtuoso exponent of dexterity (just listen to The Flight of the Bumble Bee by Rimsky- Korsakov, supercharged by Cziffra. The Fire Dance by Manuel de Falla or the Finale of Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto); he is also a virtuoso exponent of repertoire (ranging from Bach, the “Master”, with whom he begins, of course, to Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, but also Bernstein, Gottschalk and Mancini and his Pink Panther, or indeed from a waltz by Strauss to a tango by Piazzola or a Hungarian Dance by Brahms!) Moreover, he is a virtuoso exponent of style (from the tenderness of a Schumann Träumerei to the fireworks of the Khachaturian Sabre Dance; from the limpidity of Debussy’s Clair de Lune to the flamboyance of a Rachmaninov Prelude; from the sound of the guitar that he conjures up for Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra to the pure singing of the violin in the Méditation from Thaïs by Massenet or the choral mightiness of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.)

With this breathtaking musical garden of delights, one could be forgiven for thinking that Cyprien Katsaris’ intent was to produce a beguiling digest of all these pianistic peaks he has scaled, all the flashes that have marked his success, all the byways he has explored and vaulted in expressing his poetic personality.