Claudine Simon is a pianist and sound artist who experiments with lutherie and the possibilities offered by her instrument.
Trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris with Jean-François Heisser, Marie-Josèphe Jude and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, has had many encounters that have nourished her artistic practice. As a performer, she is committed to defending the works of the repertoire as well as those of living composers. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed at the Opéra de Lyon, La Roque d’Anthéron, the Opéra Comique, the Cité de la Musique, and at the Tautavel and Aix-en-Provence festivals, as well as abroad (on tours in India, China and Europe, amongst others).
She is currently developing projects at the intersection of several disciplines – sound, visual arts, theatre and movement, revisiting the piano and its imaginary world.
In 2021, she created Pianomachine, a choreographed solo piece featuring a piano hybridised by machines, followed by Anatomia in 2023 (premiered at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg), a Liszt-inspired recital that evolves into an anatomical theatre performance.
In 2025, she premiered An additional courntry at the Rouen Opera house, a sound-based theatre piece suitable for all ages ; she also received a commission from the Monte Carlo Printemps des Arts Festival for An ear alone is not a being a dramatised concert premiered in April 2026.
She is a winner of the ‘Mondes Nouveaux’ call for proposals, a writing grant from the Beaumarchais-SACD Foundation, and has received commissions from the CNCMs : GMEM, Césaré, Ici l’Onde and the Printemps des Arts Festival. Her works have been staged at the Bouffes du Nord, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Opera houses : Lyon, Reims, Dijon, Rennes and Rouen, the Théâtre National de la Criée, and various national and multidisciplinary Theatre…
In 2024, she collaborated with Jeanne Candel to create and perform Fusées, a musical theatre piece suitable for all ages.
Reimagining the world of the piano |
Having conducted research through improvisation on the prepared piano, I am now developing various stage projects that broaden the scope of the piano and renew its instrument making.
What drives me is to give substance to this experimental treatment of the piano through composition and stage performance. For me, it is about inhabiting the piano in a different way — exploring its history, challenging its conventions, the ways of playing it, hearing it, re-enchanting it. And this is always done through a cross-disciplinary approach, where music inspires and is nourished by the visual arts, dance and theatre.
I often create my shows based on a piece from the repertoire. My choice is made intuitively — by the nature of a fragment, an emotion, an event, or the memory of something absolutely moving that leaves a mark and connects me to a work. I am connected to it perhaps because I have spent a long time with it, working on it, reflecting on it, absorbing it, performing it in public… The piece then acts in retrospect like a ghost that haunts me, a recurring object, an insistent presence.
I work on it in a kind of decomposition — then recomposition of the material. But what happens, what takes place, is a moment when sound reasserts itself, becomes the primary thing again — a free sound, freed from the rules and laws imposed on it by musical tradition.
This practice of decomposition is not destructive but generative: it opens up the work to new possibilities of existence, to other modes of listening. It is my current, non-exhaustive way of inventing my own musical forms and rules.
Beyond the musical material, decomposition becomes a true mode of thinking. Freeing oneself from inherited gestures, questioning the customs and constraints that structure our relationship to classical music, undoing dominant representations: these are all ways of reappropriating a language, a body, a way of listening.
Recomposing then means inventing new grammars and new architectures — creating new arrangements that question our relationship to heritage and creation. Thinking of creation as composting: where what is undone nourishes what is to come, materially and spiritually.
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