...with her partner Sylvio Gualda, the Platini of percussion, Elisabeth Chojnacka gambolled...before concluding with François-Bernard Mâche's Anaphores, a play of lines that dialogue, shift, continue, exchange and reunite in a very luminous tangle of beautiful sound poetry, where so many mysterious percussion instruments further enhanced the thousand jewels of the harpsichord.
                   
                                         Jacques Longchampt, Le Monde 6 March 1982

François-Bernard Mâche's Anaphores is very appealing, with its modal melodic research, its courteous dialogue between harpsichord and percussion and its limpid structure. The director of our musicology institute had to be present at this audition, to receive the applause in the company of his excellent performers Chojnacka and Sylvio Gualda.

                                    M.M. Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace 2 October 1984

François-Bernard Mâche...is one of the most personal French composers of the middle generation. Like Xenakis, he is opposed to serialism, and his musical thinking is strongly influenced by the experience of electro-acoustic music. The element of sound, far from being abstract, plays a fundamental role in his music. He had already written several pieces for Elisabeth Chojnacka, notably Korwar (with tape), which was a worldwide success, and percussion had also occupied him on more than one occasion (Kemit, Maraé, Aera) when he brought the two sound worlds together for the first time. Anaphores, he explains, means references, repetitions and ascensions, and the title of this piece, based on a chromatic mode spread over two octaves, refers to the shifts that occur between the basic melody and its various repetitions. The superimpositions follow the canon principle, but each time at a different speed. In the percussion, melodic instruments dominate (tuned gongs, marimba, vibraphone), and the work is certainly calmer, more lyrical and more sensitive than that of Xenakis. The rhythmic structures are derived in part from the poetry of Pindar.

                                        Harry Halbreich, Erato disc (30) NUM 75104 (1985)

...the perfectly musical sensitivity of François-Bernard Mâche ...Much more interesting, [his] Anaphores reveal to us, from the harpsichord to the percussion, the entity of a musician perfectly convincing by the affect going beyond the mere craft of an artist whose spirit goes beyond the letter.

                                        Paul Druey, La Tribune de Genève 26 March 1986

...François-Bernard Mâche's Anaphores is in a different vein. The dazzling virtuosity (hampered by the powerful amplification of the harpsichord, paradoxically absent by dint of being sonorous) conveys a disturbing propensity for violence. The playing panics, then picks up again heavily, sucked towards an abyss where harpsichord and percussion rub shoulders dangerously.

                                            J.-L. Rieder, Journal de Genève 26 March 1986

...François-Bernard Mâche's Anaphores is more elaborate and contrapuntal. It demands an independence of voice and musical thought that allows the superimposition of lines with different rhythmic values. The emotion of the initial song, the furtive rustle punctuated by threatening blows, the magic of the sonorities whose resonance extends into space, the predominance of rhythm to the point of intoxication, all hint at multiple underlying cultural references.
                                                                    Myriam Tétaz,  (Genève)  27-28 March 1986

In the Duo Anaphores by Messiaen's pupil François-Bernard Mâche, born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1935 and still to be discovered in German-speaking Switzerland, Gualda carefully reduced the glistening brilliance of the xylophone in order to indulge in lyrical beauty of sound in the introductory solo of the same instrument. Cadenza-like melismatic episodes, the finely balanced adaptation of contrasting tone colours in the high registers and the outbursts of seemingly masculine structures of the extremely differentiated percussion lend the piece striking features.

                                                      Walter Labhart, Basler Zeitung 29 Mars 1986

François-Bernard Mâche's Anaphores, for harpsichord and percussion: Mâche's intelligently made compositions are always worth hearing.

                                              Andrew Porter, New Yorker 8 December 1986

Elisabeth Chojnacka, Françoise Kubler and Accroche-Note, the voices of Musicatreize, and then the Percussions de Strasbourg were the experienced and efficient artisans of the François-Bernard Mâche day at Musica.
In the presence of the composer, of course, the event produced an elegant monograph on this musician born in 1935, now a member of the Institut, a scholar and musicologist who was also an academic in Strasbourg. His entire body of work, spanning more than thirty years, nourishes, through infinite reflections on the relationship between language and music, a contemporary meditation on the universal archetypes of culture, and on nature as a model.
And his original approach has always resulted in pages of the utmost finesse, in which sonority plays the leading role, but does not shy away from sometimes highly advanced technologies. These are always lively pieces, with a dramatic structure. Mâche takes us on astonishing planetary journeys, in which he draws on the deep historical and cultural strata of vanished civilisations as much as on the sounds of the natural elements.
A thousand imaginary worlds
Elisabeth Chojnacka, the famous pioneer of contemporary harpsichord playing, whose return to Musica was hailed here, uses the ancient timbre, in perpetual movement of impeccable regularity, or in polyrhythmic hand movements, to produce unusual effects in confrontation with other instruments. In Solstice, with the recorded organ, in Korwar, with the tape, in Anaphores with the percussion of Emmanuel Séjourné.

                          Marc Munch, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace 23 September 2004

The last work on the programme of this concert, Anaphores, is without doubt the most significant of Mâche's musical humanism and, at the same time, the most musically dense. A long vibraphone introduction precedes an exciting dialogue between harpsichord and percussion. In this dialogue, imitations and rhythmic shifts are interwoven into a rigorous construction that culminates in a grand final crescendo. This is no mere effect, however, but the logical conclusion to a musical journey. Emmanuel Séjourné on percussion proved an attentive and discreet partner to the harpsichord. For every queen there is honour. Elisabeth Chojnacka, the privileged interpreter of most of these works, dominated this very fine concert with her strong personality. Her rhythmic rigour was infallible and her modesty exemplary: a great lady of music.

                                  Gabriel Andrès, L'ami du peuple hebdo 3 October 2004