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Correspondances
Maurice Ravel, Cyril Scott, George Enescu

Cristian Sandrin

Correspondances

Price: € 14.95
Format: CD
Label: Antarctica
UPC: 0608917734324
Catnr: AR 043
Release date: 07 April 2023
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Label
Antarctica
UPC
0608917734324
Catalogue number
AR 043
Release date
07 April 2023
Album
Artist(s)
Composer(s)
EN
DE

About the album

The present album recreates a unique conversation between the music of Cyril Scott, George Enescu and Maurice Ravel. This conversation takes place through the medium of sound poems to create a reality which is perhaps more perfect than our own. Furthermore, this album reveals an intricate web of friendships and mutual influences between musical artists working in Paris – relationships which empowered them to develop distinct but related musical languages. The works recorded here display a common musical language – a language whose syntax springs directly out of Wagner’s deconstruction of tonal harmony, further elaborated by Debussy’s free experimentations with timbre, sound and touch. In the latter’s art, the fluid harmonic language creates the sense of a series of vivid pictorial images – but these images also suggest a further intangible element beyond the realm of sense impressions, an intuition of the ‘Symbol’, a key which can unlock the inner content of appearances, an idea which played a crucial role in the artistic discourse of the time. Ravel, Enescu and Scott were unequivocally children of their times, but perhaps what is truly fascinating to performer and listener lies in disclosing the individual response of each composer to this artistic milieu.

Born into a family of musicians from Bucharest, Cristian Sandrin has been sur - rounded by classical music all his life. The year 2017 was marked by his successful and critically well received debut solo recital at the Wigmore Hall. Cristian is a scholarship holder of the Imogen Cooper Music Trust benefiting from her unique one-to-one guidance and mentorship since 2017

"Dieses Album ist dem liebevollen Andenken an meinen Vater Sandu Sandrin gewidmet, der vor kurzem verstorben ist und diese Welt verlassen hat, ohne die Veröffentlichung meines Debüts zu erleben." - Cristian Sandrin

"Correspondances" stellt ein einzigartiges Gespräch zwischen der Musik von Cyril Scott, George Enescu und Maurice Ravel her. Dieses Gespräch findet über das Medium der Tondichtung statt, um eine Realität zu schaffen, die vielleicht vollkommener ist als unsere eigene. Diese Vision der Kunst wurzelt jedoch in einem bestimmten Zeitgeist und in zeitgenössischen Strömungen der bildenden und literarischen Kunst - einschließlich Symbolismus und Impressionismus.

Die hier eingespielten Werke weisen eine gemeinsame musikalische Sprache auf - eine Sprache, deren Syntax direkt aus Wagners Dekonstruktion der tonalen Harmonie entspringt und von Debussys freien Experimenten mit Klangfarben, Geräuschen und Berührungen weiterentwickelt wird. In der Kunst von Debussy erzeugt die fließende harmonische Sprache den Eindruck einer Reihe von lebendigen Bildern - aber diese Bilder suggerieren auch ein weiteres, nicht greifbares Element jenseits der Sinneseindrücke, eine Intuition des "Symbols", ein Schlüssel, der den inneren Inhalt der Erscheinungen aufschließen kann, eine Idee, die im künstlerischen Diskurs der Zeit eine entscheidende Rolle spielte.

Ravel, Enescu und Scott waren eindeutig Kinder ihrer Zeit, aber vielleicht liegt das wirklich Faszinierende für Interpreten und Zuhörer darin, die individuelle Reaktion jedes einzelnen Komponisten auf dieses künstlerische Milieu zu entdecken.

Artist(s)

Cristian Sandrin (piano)

Born into a family of musicians from Bucharest, Cristian Sandrin has been surrounded by classical music all his life. His frequent visits to the historic Romanian Atheneum concert hall and his attendances at the prestigious Enescu Festival shaped his musical aspirations from early childhood. Not surprising, years later, he would have his own debut at the Atheneum at the age of 13. Cristian is an artist engaging with a multitude of repertoire, but especially devoted to the Classical and Romantic repertoire. His passion for Mozart's piano concertos led him to direct from the keyboard several concertos during Summer Festivals at the Royal Academy of Music, as well as for the official opening of the Angela Burgess Recital Hall. From 2018–2020 he...
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Born into a family of musicians from Bucharest, Cristian Sandrin has been surrounded by classical music all his life. His frequent visits to the historic Romanian Atheneum concert hall and his attendances at the prestigious Enescu Festival shaped his musical aspirations from early childhood. Not surprising, years later, he would have his own debut at the Atheneum at the age of 13.

Cristian is an artist engaging with a multitude of repertoire, but especially devoted to the Classical and Romantic repertoire. His passion for Mozart's piano concertos led him to direct from the keyboard several concertos during Summer Festivals at the Royal Academy of Music, as well as for the official opening of the Angela Burgess Recital Hall. From 2018–2020 he was privileged to tour the UK as an artist of the Countess of Munster Recital Scheme. Additionally, Cristian is a scholarship holder of the Imogen Cooper Music Trust benefiting from her unique one-to-one guidance and mentorship since 2017.

In 2021 Cristian travelled to Romania for his debut with the acclaimed George Enescu Philharmonic performing Mozart's K503 Piano Concerto in C major at the country's foremost music venue: The Romanian Atheneum - the same temple of music from Cristian's childhood. Since 2020, Cristian has performed challenging solo programmes including Beethoven's last three sonatas, Bach's Goldberg Variations in famous venues across Europe from Berlin's Konzerthaus, Radio Hall in Bucharest to London's LSO St Luke's - recitals that have left audiences and critics spellbound by the Cristian's mature interpretations.

As Artistic Director of the Kettner Concerts series in London, Cristian crafts engaging solo and chamber music programs that invite audiences to engage with broad landscapes of classical music. His latest project, premiering at St John's Smith Square in February 2025, offers an inventive take on Bach's Goldberg Variations: The New Goldberg Variations project interweaves three newly commissioned variation by up-and-coming composers into Bach's original work, creating a special dialogue between tradition and contemporary creativity.

Cristian collaborates often as a soloist with the Petersfield Festival Orchestra, the Oxford Sinfonia, the Bournemouth Bach Choir Orchestra as well as orchestras from his native Romania: the Bacau State Philharmonic, Sibiu State Philharmonic, Ramnicu-Valcea State Philharmonic, Oltenia Philharmonic and Bucharest Symphony Orchestra.


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Composer(s)

Maurice Ravel

Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer who is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the Conservatoire Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of...
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Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer who is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the Conservatoire Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. He made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.
As a slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas, and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies and only one religious work. Many of his works exist in two versions: a first, piano score and a later orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance.

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Cyril Scott

Cyril Scott (1879-1970) was truly one of the more remarkable men of his generation. Far ahead of his time in many ways, in others he was inescapably a product of the Victorian age in which he grew up. As John Ireland his friend and exact contemporary wrote to Scott in 1949 “You were the first British composer to write music which was non-academic, free and individual in style and of primary significance. Long before I could write anything in the least worthwhile you had made a great reputation in England and on the Continent”.   His music, though certainly the most important, is only one aspect of his enormously varied creative output. He wrote the lyrics for many of his songs and...
more
Cyril Scott (1879-1970) was truly one of the more remarkable men of his generation. Far ahead of his time in many ways, in others he was inescapably a product of the Victorian age in which he grew up. As John Ireland his friend and exact contemporary wrote to Scott in 1949 “You were the first British composer to write music which was non-academic, free and individual in style and of primary significance. Long before I could write anything in the least worthwhile you had made a great reputation in England and on the Continent”.
His music, though certainly the most important, is only one aspect of his enormously varied creative output. He wrote the lyrics for many of his songs and the libretti for his operas. He published forty books; on alternate medicine, ethics, religion, occultism, psychology, humour and music; wrote two autobiographies forty years apart and six volumes of poetry. Many of the books he wrote remain in print today and one trilogy in particular, The Initiate, written in the 1920s was optioned just recently for a film and continues to be translated into other languages, the latest being Swedish and Romanian.
In his staunch advocacy of alternate medicine decades before it became mainstream Scott was again ahead of his time. His poetry on the other hand is very much of the period, deeply romantic and infused throughout with a Pre-Raphaelite sensibility. In the same mode he designed some of his own furniture, trying, as he said, to make his lodgings look as much like a monastic cell as possible. More practically, he later devised a unique piano. It was a regular upright but with a sloping front replacing the lid to form a broad writing desk leaving him space beneath to play on and compose.
Aware that some people felt he was spreading himself too thin, he defended himself in his later biography Bone of Contention, (1969) by saying: “Holding the belief that the more subjects one can, within reason, become interested in, the less time and inclination one has to be unhappy, I will make no excuses for what the friends of my music call my versatility, and its detractors the dissipation of my energies (for) in a sad plight is the composer who has no sideline or pastime to turn to during those desolate periods when musical ideation gives out, leaving but that painful sense of emptiness and frustration so familiar to all creative artists.” Scott was born in Oxton, near Liverpool to a middle class family in 1879. As his son, I truly find it hard to realise that I’m intimately connected to someone who, as a student in Frankfurt heard Clara Schumann play and remembered his teachers taking the day off to go to Vienna for Brahms’ funeral. He was born into a world we wouldn’t recognise today, except through costume dramas on the BBC. It was a world of the horse and carriage and cobbled streets, a world without cars, planes, radio, TV, computers, CDs or the Internet. The last time I saw him we sat in front of the TV together and he watched a man land on the moon. That’s quite a change in one lifetime! Scott’s father was a businessman involved in shipping whose chief interest was the study of Greek. His mother played the piano “with a certain superficial brilliance, and had even written a waltz which somehow got into print.” (Bone of Contention) As a young child he was abnormally sensitive and precocious, bursting into tears at any music that affected him.
He played the piano almost before he could talk, picking out tunes from the barrel organs heard in the street outside. When he was 12 his parents sent him to the Conservatory in Frankfurt to study piano where he was the youngest pupil accepted up to that time. He stayed there for eighteen months, came home, decided he was more interested in composition than in teaching or being a concert pianist and returned to the Conservatory when he was not quite 17. There at one time or another he met Norman O’Neill, Balfour Gardiner, Roger Quilter and the one he remained closest to, Percy Grainger, the five musicians becoming collectively known as the Frankfurt Group. Grainger became not only an especially good friend but also a tireless advocate of Scott’s music, playing his compositions, in particular the Sonata No. 1, all over the world. He was also extraordinarily generous to him. During WWII, having earlier become an American citizen and with restrictions on taking money out of the country, he insisted that Scott be given all his British royalties and after the war lent him his cottage in Pevensey Bay rent-free for two and a half years. Success came early for Scott. His First Symphony was performed in Darmstadt in 1901 and his Second under Henry Wood in London two years later.
It took one hundred years, though, before his next Symphony, The Muses, had its first hearing in 2003! For the first quarter of the last century he was in the forefront of modern British composers, hailed by Eugene Goossens as ‘the father of modern British music’ and admired by men as diverse as Elgar, Debussy, Richard Strauss and Stravinsky. By the time he died in 1970, however, he was remembered by the general public for little more than Lotus Land (1905) and small piano pieces such as Water Wagtail (1910), which at one time, according to Lewis Foreman, was used as the signature tune to the Test Match broadcasts on the BBC! What caused such a sharp decline is hard to assess. Musical tastes change. Avant garde can easily become vieux jeu. Maybe Scott’s highly individual style, which to listeners more accustomed to the work of Stanford and Parry would initially have appeared radical and ‘modern’, began to seem dated. Or, maybe Diana Swann was right when in a perceptive article for the British Music Society in 1996 she wrote, “ ... Perhaps too much hope was pinned on him at a point when England’s fading Imperial importance craved a compensatory and valuable place in European music.” Another possibility, as she noted, was that after WWI, “English music was encouraged to progress only along the folksong/Tudor revival/Christian agnostic path” and the new composers finding favour had all been trained at the Royal College or Academy of Music.

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