Célimène Daudet was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1977, to a French father and a Haitian mother. She trained at the conservatoires of Aix-en-Provence, Paris and Rueil-Malmaison before taking a first prize in piano at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, then studying chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire with the violinist Jean Mouillère, and was later artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. She has played at Carnegie Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Philharmonie de Paris, and at the festivals of La Roque d’Anthéron, Aix-en-Provence and La Folle Journée de Nantes.

Her recorded repertoire runs from Bach’s Art of Fugue to Messiaen and Debussy, but the record that matters most to this site is Haïti mon amour, a programme of Haitian concert piano music. Composers such as Ludovic Lamothe wrote méringues and danses for the piano in a European concert idiom, and almost none of that repertoire reaches the streaming catalogues that classical listeners browse: Lamothe’s own auto-generated YouTube channel is empty. Daudet’s recordings are, for the moment, the route by which that music is here at all.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9lim%C3%A8ne_Daudet
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17177023