"Sitting at the piano with a listening audience is the essence of my artistic practice. […] For me, that is a kind of 'breath'. It gives me the reason to live and to create." — Frederik Croene
With Sans Retour, Frederik Croene concludes his solo piano triptych. For this project, he collaborated again with artist Karl Van Welden, who provided the visual material. The overarching theme of the triptych is an affectionate exploration of the futility of our responses to climate change. The three albums — Cul de Sac, Solastalgia and Sans Retour — released on the Cortizona label, reflect three psychological stages in the realization that we have landed in a doomsday scenario.
In Cul de Sac (2019), Croene searched for the dead ends of the piano in a repetitive rollercoaster of motifs and rhythms.
- When is a simple musical motif exhausted?
- When does the romantic sigh become meaningless?
- From what point does virtuosity lead nowhere?
- What if the piano itself falls short, has too few keys?
With Solastalgia (2022), Croene and Van Welden mapped out the threats arising from climate change. The title refers to the homesickness people experience when separated from their familiar living environment. Croene wrote a four-part piano work with a dense score full of virtuosic playing, a clear reference to 19th-century repertoires. For each part, Van Welden created an accompanying video with images of ships in quarantine.
Sans Retour premiered last week in Ghent in the concert hall of De Bijloke. The work consists of six piano compositions, each a tribute to an intrepid aviation pioneer who died in a plane crash. Each composition is supported by audiovisual material in collaboration with Van Welden.
Part 1 — Kosmonaut, in memoriam Yuri Gagarin
The piece opens with a recording of the first successful space mission by Russian Yuri Gagarin. The introduction ends with the roaring sound of igniting rocket boosters. At that moment, Croene takes over with a powerful bass ostinato, followed by epic images of aviation launches. The virtuosity reaches a peak just before the end, after which the music explodes into even more intense bass sounds. Then everything dissolves into a high, mysterious echo. At this turning point, a bizarre recording of a failed rocket launch appears — eerily beautiful to watch.
Part 2 — Queen Bess, in memoriam Bessie Coleman
This part honors Bessie Coleman, who died at the age of 34 during a test flight. Coleman was the first Black, Native American woman to hold a pilot's license, which she obtained in France because she was refused at flight schools in the US.
The part opens with the image of a falling person (Coleman?). Musically, it forms a continuum with the previous part, but it evolves into a taut romantic accompanying figure with plenty of pedal. The melody remains suspended in despair, searching for direction. The whole is much more restrained than the explosive first part and provides a welcome contrast after a turbulent opening quarter hour. Only at the end does a bass signal break through the subdued atmosphere and announce the next part.
Part 3 — Sky King, in memoriam Richard Russell
In 2018, 28-year-old Richard Russell hijacked a plane at Seattle-Tacoma airport in the United States. Inexperienced — except through video games and simulators — he managed to take off and even perform some stunts. Afterwards, he committed suicide by crashing the aircraft on a small island. It is a strange and tragic story, especially when you hear the recordings of his communication with the F-15 pilots who had to intercept him.
The music sounds depressing and contrasts sharply with the almost lighthearted way Russell speaks with the pilots. Eventually his voice falls silent and we see images of the crashed aircraft.
Part 4 — Kamikaze, in memoriam Yukio Seki
The subject matter becomes even darker in this fourth part. The piece swells gradually and forms one large arc of tension spanning ten minutes. As the ominous music unfolds, we see images of Japanese kamikaze aircraft whose pilots deliberately crashed into American ships. Yukio Seki was the first Japanese pilot to succeed in doing so — frightening and bizarre to watch, but considered the highest military honor in Japan at the time.
In August 2025, Croene traveled to Tokyo to send the empty album covers of Sans Retour back to Belgium from as many different post offices as possible. On August 15, exactly 80 years after the Japanese declaration of the end of the war, he applied an additional stamp from the War Memorial Museum in Tokyo to all the covers.
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(c) Karl Van Welden[/caption]
Part 5 — Vol de nuit, in memoriam Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The fifth and penultimate part is a tribute to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It can be understood as a nocturne and is named after the novel he wrote about his experiences as a mail pilot and director of the Argentine postal service. The novel also inspired the transformation of the album cover into mail art.
The music gradually climbs to the high register of the piano and remains consistently mysterious and haunting. The piece ends again with the bass signal we heard earlier in the second section.
Part 6 — C'est Kiki, in memoriam Daniel Kinet
The final section presents a Ghent folk tune as a tribute to Daniel Kinet. In 1910, at the age of 26, he lost his life during the Ghent festival when he accidentally crashed into a potato field. He was the first Belgian victim of an airplane accident. The playful yet dark folk tune about "Kiki" is completely stripped of piano sounds.
Set up as one Beethovenian composition, Croene once again demonstrates the enormous wealth of tonal colours that a piano can produce. The connecting thread is a melody based on the Dies Irae, which appears in six different forms to embody the in memoriam concept.