A conversation with the French musician who is taking tango’s soul in bold new directions — and reshaping the future of one of the world’s most singular instruments.
Let’s start from the beginning: you began studying the bandonéon at five years old, at a conservatoire on the outskirts of Paris. How does a child that age end up playing such an unusual instrument? Was it your choice, your parents’, or just chance?
A bit of chance, a bit of luck. My parents weren’t musicians, but they wanted me to have music in my life. The Conservatoire de Gennevilliers happened to offer a bandonéon class at the time — something quite extraordinary. My older sister went to a concert, saw the instrument, was struck by it, and started learning. I watched her play and wanted to do the same.
At five, you don’t choose an instrument with any real awareness of what it means. I knew nothing about its history, about tango, about the very particular place the bandonéon holds in music. What drew me in was its shape, its movement, and the sense of mystery around it. Looking back, I understand how decisive that encounter was. Very few children, in France or anywhere else, get the chance to start the bandonéon so young. That class in Gennevilliers was a rare privilege, and it clearly set the course for everything that followed.
At the conservatoire you studied with very different teachers: Jean-Baptiste Henry, César Stroscio, and Juan José Mosalini. How did you bring those contrasting approaches together?
I started with Jean-Baptiste Henry, who mainly taught the younger students. Then I moved on to César Stroscio, and finally to Juan José Mosalini. Three very different musical personalities, and three very different ways of teaching.
The core approach was oral: you listened and you reproduced, with little written mediation — an invaluable method for anyone who really wants to play tango. Stroscio had a phrase he kept coming back to: “one note played well is worth more than ten notes badly thought out.” Towards the end of my time with him, I had to bring him a new piece every week — a discipline that vastly expanded my repertoire and my adaptability. With Mosalini the focus shifted to chamber music and the different stylistic currents within tango’s orchestral formations. In individual lessons he would sometimes ask us to sight-read Bach’s Inventions without any preparation. Technically, he placed great emphasis on what he called the “air column” — for him, the very foundation of how to play the instrument.
I could have experienced those three approaches as contradictions. Instead I tried to synthesise them. Each teacher gave me a different way of seeing the instrument, and from there I built my own. I was never trying to reproduce their style — I was using what they’d given me to find mine.
You also studied harmony, analysis and composition with Bernard Cavanna, the conservatoire’s director. How much did that more “academic” formation change your relationship with tango?
Contemporary music attracted me early on — other languages, other forms of expression, a different relationship with musical writing. Cavanna taught long analysis classes at the conservatoire, sometimes lasting several hours, and for me they were a revelation. At the same time, I was moving towards a scientific track at school, and that analytical mindset, that closeness to research, fundamentally changed how I approach music. I’ve since collaborated with Cavanna on all of my albums and have premiered several of his works.
I love tango and it remains central to who I am as a musician. But I never wanted to stay confined to it. I’m convinced the bandonéon has an expressive potential that is still largely untapped. With my projects, I try to bring it into places where people don’t expect to find it — to show sides of the instrument that usually stay in the shadows.
The bandonéon has German roots, but in Europe it’s still a marginal instrument compared to the piano or strings. Has that shaped your path? And in what way does France stand apart from the rest of the continent?
It’s shaped everything. When you choose the bandonéon, you don’t have the same ecosystem as a violinist or a pianist: fewer teachers, less published repertoire, fewer reference concerts, fewer models to look to. But there’s a flip side — all that absence leaves you room to find your own way.
The class in Gennevilliers was unique in Europe, almost without parallel. On one hand, we had the privilege of learning from outstanding musicians; on the other, we were working with virtually no pedagogical resources. There was no method for learning the bandonéon from scratch — only technical texts written for players who already had experience. So you ended up tackling the original repertoire very early: at thirteen, my sister and I were playing traditional tangos in duo, without any simplification. Total immersion — formative, but demanding. It forced us to invent our own tools and become independent quickly.
That scarcity fed my desire to create. Where piano and violin have an enormous heritage — at times almost overwhelming in its abundance — the bandonéon still had open spaces, unexplored territory. I think that’s what drew me towards research, contemporary composition, and building new repertoire for the instrument.
You won second prize at the Klingenthal International Competition before turning seventeen. A milestone — or did you already have something bigger in mind?
The bandonéon wasn’t represented in French higher music institutions at the time, so at sixteen I decided to enter Klingenthal. I wanted to measure myself against the international scene, to get a real sense of my level in a context where, for our instrument, there were very few ways to do that. Second prize was a significant step: it gave me confidence and a kind of legitimacy at a moment when I was still figuring out my future. Above all, it confirmed that the path I’d chosen — becoming a professional musician — was genuinely within reach.
But I never saw it as an end point. I already wanted to explore other artistic horizons and help expand the bandonéon’s repertoire. That competition was more of a starting line than a crowning achievement: it gave me the push to keep going with more ambition and more freedom.
Your music goes well beyond tango — Ligeti, Stockhausen, Piazzolla, the jazz of Médéric Collignon, the Greek singing of Katerina Fotinaki, contemporary composers like Cavanna and Werani. How would you describe your relationship with tango? Is it a home you keep leaving, or a starting point you’ve long since moved past?
I owe a great deal to tango — especially in how I interpret music, and in the freedom I’ve developed in my relationship with the score. It shaped my training, my sense of sound and phrasing. Yet from the beginning I felt the urge to open that world up to other aesthetics: contemporary music, jazz, very different popular traditions.
I’ve never experienced tango as a boundary. It’s where I started, and it’s still alive in the way I play. In that sense it’s a real anchor. But a living language isn’t limited to its own vocabulary. So I wouldn’t say I keep leaving tango, nor that I’ve moved past it — it’s become an interior territory, a place I depart from to explore other landscapes. Every encounter, every repertoire, every collaboration shifts something in my relationship with the bandonéon, and that shift comes back into how I play and think about the instrument.
Has your work as a musician taken you to Italy?
Yes, several times. The most significant experience was a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, where I began work on my album JEU. It stayed with me, artistically and personally. I found a relationship with music there that felt very natural — embedded in the culture, woven into everyday life. Music doesn’t seem compartmentalised in Italy; it’s connected to people, to places, to ordinary exchanges.
I was also struck by the coexistence of the ancient and the contemporary — statues and monuments appearing at every turn as if they’d always been there, right alongside modern urban life. It creates an environment of remarkable poetic density. That experience reminded me of something essential: music isn’t just a specialised domain reserved for insiders. It’s a way of inhabiting the world, of sharing time, of building connections between people.
You teach bandonéon and chamber tango at the Conservatoire de Gennevilliers — the same class you once attended as a student. How do you work with your students?
The class has changed enormously since 1988. At the beginning it answered a very specific need: there were almost no institutional places where you could study the bandonéon and tango. It played a pioneering role in France, gradually building a real space for teaching and transmission around this instrument. Being able to carry that legacy forward genuinely moves me.
In my teaching, I’m not trying to pass on a particular sound or a model to imitate. The technical foundations are there, the stylistic elements too, and a core repertoire. But what I really care about is helping each student build their own musical independence. Developing curiosity, deep listening, a personal awareness of how they relate to the instrument. I also insist on the idea that tango is not a museum: it’s a living tradition, shaped by many influences, constantly evolving. Understanding its history is essential — but it’s just as important to ask what this music can still become, and how each person can find their own voice within it.
You’re about to publish a bandonéon method with the Éditions Henry Lemoine. How did the project come about, and who is it for?
It came out of a simple observation: despite growing interest in the bandonéon, there are still very few structured pedagogical tools that let you approach the instrument progressively and in depth. Over years of teaching, I had accumulated exercises, reflections and working methods that I wanted to bring together into something more coherent. The collaboration with Henry Lemoine was the right moment to do that. I was genuinely honoured that a publisher with such a deep history in musical transmission would take an interest in an instrument as singular as the bandonéon.
The method is aimed at everyone: beginners and more advanced players, with or without a teacher. It will be available in three languages. I’ve brought together technical foundations, fingering exercises, reflections on the instrument, and a range of historical and stylistic reference points. My aim wasn’t just to explain how to play the bandonéon, but to help people understand its internal logic. It’s a fascinating instrument, sometimes disorienting in its diatonic system — to play it freely, you first have to really understand it.
Other bandonéon methods already exist, starting with the historic one by Marcos Madrigal. What does yours add?
First, I want to be clear: this method isn’t trying to replace anything that came before. Every existing method has made a genuine contribution to the transmission of the bandonéon and has guided generations of musicians. What’s different about mine is that it grew out of daily teaching practice, nourished by many years working with students of very different ages and backgrounds. I tried to address the concrete questions that come up when someone first encounters the instrument — how to navigate a keyboard that looks almost incomprehensible at first, how to build reliable landmarks, how to develop a fluid relationship with the bellows, and how to connect technique with musicality right from the start.
The bandonéon is often presented as a mysterious, almost inaccessible object. I believe it’s essential, from the very first steps, to put technique at the service of phrasing, listening and the pleasure of playing — not after years of mechanical exercises, but immediately. This method also bears the mark of my own path, which has always straddled several worlds: tango, yes, but also contemporary repertoires. I wanted to convey a vision of the bandonéon as a complete instrument — rich in its history, but open to any number of musical horizons.
You have three very different albums to your name: Francesita (2018), Piazzolla 2021 (2021) and JEU (2024). Is there a thread running through them, or does each one mark a clear break?
On the surface they point in very different directions. Francesita is rooted in tango, in a certain memory of the repertoire; Piazzolla 2021 grew out of an encounter with a towering body of work, in the centenary year of Astor’s birth; JEU ventures into much more open territory, where jazz, classical music and contemporary writing all come into dialogue. But I don’t experience them as ruptures. I see them as different faces of the same ongoing inquiry.
What has always interested me is understanding how a tradition stays alive when it meets other languages, and how the bandonéon can find an authentic place in the most varied contexts. The common thread might be exactly that: a constant curiosity, and a refusal to treat repertoires as closed worlds.
With Piazzolla 2021, for instance, I didn’t want to reproduce his works faithfully — would he have done that himself? Piazzolla revisited old tangos with his own entirely personal vision. I treated his pieces as standards: starting points from which to build something of my own, to keep them alive rather than preserve them under glass. In that sense the three albums aren’t separate chapters — they’re a conversation that keeps going.
A question we ask everyone: what would you say to someone who wants to discover the bandonéon today, in Europe, outside Argentina? And what future do you see for this instrument away from its homeland?
First: don’t be intimidated. The bandonéon has a reputation for being difficult, complicated, almost out of reach — and there’s some truth to that, it does ask for time and patience. But it’s also an extraordinarily rich instrument, and the relationship it creates with sound, with breath, with musical expression is unlike anything else.
My second piece of advice would be to play with other musicians as early as possible. The bandonéon naturally belongs to a collective practice — in tango, in chamber music, in ensemble playing. Listening, exchanging, learning to converse with other musicians: these things shape you more, and faster, than any amount of solitary practice.
As for the future, I’m genuinely optimistic. The bandonéon is a rare instrument, but rarity can be a strength. Its growth outside Argentina doesn’t depend only on preserving a tradition — it depends on the instrument’s ability to speak to other musical cultures, to be contemporary. Its history is already one of travel: born in Germany, transformed in Argentina, now circulating between cultures all the way to Japan. That mobility is part of its identity. Tango will always be its natural home, but I’m convinced the bandonéon still has a great deal to say beyond that repertoire. Its unique timbre, its capacity to breathe and sing, the range of colours it can produce — all of this makes it a deeply contemporary instrument, one that can inspire new generations of musicians and composers wherever they are in the world.
