Who or what are the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?
Scriabin and Ravel are my favourite composers. Twentieth-century music is exciting: the clash of cultures between jazz, eclectic film music, and electronics marks a turning point in music.
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
My most significant challenges have been my years of Musicals in Parisian theaters, and then on tours.
What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece?
Developing the scenography for my musicals was the multidimensional extension of my creativity. The work of composition on the voice, in the dramaturgy around the artists, is the total artistic culmination.
What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles or orchestras?
Each music artist of my music, from Peter Jablonski to Svetlana Andreeva, or the work of my conductor Sergey Neller, brings a new perspective to my score. I choose my artists on the high level of sensitivity.
Of which works are you most proud?
The piano is my instrument. The exercise of creating a concertante work is a magical sensory journey. I have no particular preference among my four piano concertos; each represents a moment in my life, my last twenty years.
How would you characterise your compositional language?
My musical language does not favour any particular dogma. Freedom is my first language.
How do you work?
My working method is the discovery of atmospheres, opening my imagination to themes.
As a musician, what is your definition of success?
My definition of success is the added value to my composition, offered by the performers of my music.
What advice would you give to young/aspiring composers?
The best advice I can give to young composers is to dedicate their entire live to music. It is through distance that one achieves one’s own fulfillment, and as for success, one must let the wheel turn; undoubtedly, it will stop someday in the right place. Social openness is the key to success. Any bad critique can reveal the flaws of the one who writes them. Those who dismantle artists for pleasure are part of human nature.
What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences?
Linking beauty to simplicity is undoubtedly the most direct way to arouse the appetite of a new audience for classical music. Like gastronomy, the arts in general, it is by gradually rising in the complexity of language that one can make a masterful work of great complexity appreciated one day.
What’s the one thing in the music industry we’re not talking about but you think we should be?
Everything related to music arouses the covetousness of those who trade it and the artists who perform it. Everyone’s behaviours are akin to any form of business. Whether it is the worst or the best, from armament to the most refined culture, human nature does not favor the delicacy of the soul.
What next – where would you like to be in 10 years?
I would like to have had the chance to discover other beautiful souls.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
My idea of perfect happiness is inspiration in nature.
What is your most treasured possession?
Health.
What do you enjoy doing most?
Walking by the sea.
What is your present state of mind?
Opening up to people, after immersion in musical works.
Recent releases Back Home With The Moon and AIR feature works by Christian Schittenhelm, performed by pianists Peter Jablonksi and Svetlana Andreeva respectively
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