The internationally renowned pianist, composer, and producer Mathis Picard has spent his life building a musical language that can hold every place he’s been and every tradition that shaped him. Named a “rising star” by The Scotsman at just 10 years old, Picard has grown into one of the most compelling young voices on piano today: an ASCAP Next Generation of Songwriters recipient, a member of the Montreux Jazz Foundation, and a Juilliard alumnus mentored by the legendary Kenny Barron. Critics have followed closely, too—London reviewers calling him “a knockout, as dynamic a personality as he is virtuosic on the keys” (whatsonstage.com), while Jazzwise has marked him as “one to watch.”
As a bandleader, Picard’s ambition has never been small. Through The Sound Orchestra (formerly M.S.O.), his large-scale ensemble, he’s brought expansive, genre-bending performances to stages across the United States—from NuBlu and Dizzy’s Club in New York City to Black Cat in San Francisco. Their debut EP World Unity arrived in 2020 via Outside In Music Records, offering an early glimpse of Picard’s gift: taking complexity and making it feel like movement, like story, like a living thing.
Now, with the release of Preludes & Fugues Book 1, Picard steps into his most consequential work to date—an original collection of twelve solo piano compositions that refuses easy categorisation. This is not a jazz album. It is not a classical album. It is a book of music, in the oldest and most enduring sense of the phrase.
Rooted in a compositional lineage that stretches back to Bach, Preludes & Fugues Book 1 is shaped by a modern imagination—one informed by France, Madagascar, Manchester, and New York City. It’s the sound of a life lived across borders, translated into structure and spirit. The project spans all twelve keys, unfolding through six preludes and six fugues—one piece per key—recorded in August 2025, though its earliest seeds were planted years earlier.
“Solo piano represents the roots of where I’m coming from,” Picard reflects. “It’s always been with me, from boarding school, from the pieces I was learning, from my personal relationship with music. The preludes and fugues format is a way to keep honouring that love.”
That relationship with music—personal, disciplined, and deeply philosophical—comes into sharp focus on the album’s lead single, “Mysticism Of Money (Fugue in D Minor)”, first sparked in 2018 when Picard wrote the melody that would later become its foundation. Built around the harmonic implications of a dollar sign mapped onto the circle of fifths, the piece functions as both compositional manifesto and spiritual inquiry: a meditation on value, illusion, and what we’re taught to worship.
“What’s real in this world?” Picard asks. “Love is real, but you don’t put a value on that. The mysticism of money is that there’s so much value you put to it. Which is confusing.”
In Picard’s hands, confusion becomes clarity—not by simplifying life, but by giving it form. For further information on the artist, please visit the following links:
Image provided courtesy of Two For the Show Media
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