One might say that a piano performance by Denis Levaillant is, primarily, a pianist facing and relating to his instrument. We might add that, when performing "Direct", he gives a show in every sense of the term, a show in which his physical involvement, its musical organic extension, takes us to a powerful emotional level. Obviously, it is hard to remain untouched by the intensity of his presence on stage, by a body that unfolds, retracts, sings, caresses the keyboard with a lyrical tenderness, only to suddenly abuse it with ferocious passion. Levaillant's live performances, in which he adds to the sounds he pulls out of his Steinway a powerful visual counterpart, are to be classified somewhere between an "American-style" type of show and the trance of an African griot. He seems possessed by his instrument, as if he were its body double or its reflection as an anamorphosis made of flesh, blood and sweat.

Alain Féron, may 1996.

The oeuvre that Denis Levaillant is creating for us - because, given such coherence, we must indeed speak of an oeuvre - is a veritable source of references: Paul Bley, Ellington, Lennie Tristano, Monk, Earl Hines, Jarrett, Bud Powell and Cecil Taylor are evoked in turn, in the incantatory sense of the term. The success appears resounding from the viewpoint of the difficulty of the wager; in fact, Levaillant succeeds in revealing the essence of things. He neither parodies nor paraphrases. Every time, he plays on what is most profound and personal in each of these masters of the piano. Such constancy in the bias is obviously obsessive! It is also eminently modern, in the sense that the rereading and the "indirect" play are described as such in cinema or painting. Levaillant's force, compared with copyists like Wynton Marsalis, is to preserve a distance with the subject. Thus, to say "Duke Ellington with a touch like Maurizio Pollini" does not fail to surprise.