By Stéphane Friédérich

The game is sober and elegant. Wise and content, almost. At least in the first few seconds. As if Célia Oneto Bensaid wanted to calm the impatience that we already feel, in the audience. Impatience? In truth, a fierce joy, which takes over, elegantly. Bei
ng on stage is a no-brainer, a natural state for this artist from a family of actors whose musical theatre has been imbued with the verb. As a child, she travelled in adult musicals. Today, she revives them in her own way, in a show without images, a composed illusi
on. It lets slip the notes that bead, the colors that fade, the steps dodge to other steps, in the imbalance of a three-stroke. She no longer plays like an instrumentalist. She mime, costume, stages and dances her own transcription of a play by Leonard Bernstein. Here she chooses her story. It is the orchestra that wraps itself around the pedals, raises the lyre and fires the keyboard. We are in the American spaces and the rhythms submit to the narrative. In the shade of stone hills, blinding deserts, endless skyscrapers. His first album is thus thought out, conquering, rejecting the toil, blowing on the embers of risk, tasting the transcription so long deserted. The
time for international competitions and studies at the Paris Conservatory, at the Normal School of Music is over. Rely ingoning only on yourself. Build only for yourself.

From one continent to another
 The game can be lively and scathing. He is effervescent in Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto, whose features she loves so much. Célia Oneto Bensaid experiences the passion of thickened orchestras of golden brass, gigantic monochrome flats, hatches that distort and frighten, but from which emerges an intoxicating melody. These are the new stamps of a young world that has left the stage and walked the streets. Burlesque and cynical on the surface, this music played by Célia Oneto Bensaïd resonates in the bones of her hands and arms. "I'm the conductor at the piano and my fingers… she said, observing them. He was enthu
siastic about the music of the 20th century and the still veiled outbursts of his contemporaries. She feels at home, legitimate, because her rhythmic time speaks to her of desires and hope.
In the origins, the verb and its dream
 After the rhythm, the singing. "The melody, the lied and the opera nourish my repertoire," says Célia Oneto Bensaid, who immediately adds: "On the piano, I slip into a state of mind, a German, French, English poetics… Shape doesn't matter. It is only the submerged part of the bottom, the density of the primary material. It encourages more gaming possibilities. You have to be keen in the music of the classical era to regain the momentum of improvisation that prevails in Haydn and Mozart." In
Latin territory, the perception of the climate is immediate. Instinctively, the pianist tightens the game and, naturally, it becomes more airy, of a falsely distant elegance. The literary work is the work of music. With a cheerful step, the Parisian shares a volatile joy, worries immediately disappeared. The mobility of his playing echoes his poets, from Musset to Baudelaire, Rimbaud... "You don't mess with love" … 
French and elsewhere
 Celia Oneto Bensaid has a taste for detail, a grand miniature, ample shape, but carefully chiseled. In the undulating movement of a piece by Ravel, a composer whose work she almost breathes in her fingers, but also of Fauré, dutilleux's Sonata, Poulenc's tender irreverence of a page, she animates the timbres, enchants them joints, multiplies the variety of attacks. The piano bends to her request: before she was a virtuoso, she was first a craftsman. The available instrument, the acoustics of the moment, the weather, the mood that would not be at the rendezvous, all this adorns the score. It is the story that stands out, the one chosen in the moment, in the challenge of constraint. "Playing in a concert with a difficult piano means listening even more to yourself." servant!
She also says she is very "French" for this. With a zest of panache, moreover. This is the beautiful distinction of a pointillist who has fun when others sympathize, who gathers when others declaim. Music is like a text: a game of character frictions that attract and depart according to passions, seasons and a lifetime to build. In music.