STRAVINSKY • RAVEL • GERSHWIN

French pianist Eric Ferrand-N’Kaoua was born near Paris in 1963. He studied with Madeleine de Valmalète from an early age and soon entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur, where he obtained first prize with distinction in piano when aged only fourteen, soon followed by a first prize in chamber music.

EFN’K has premièred works by Thierry Lancino, Philippe Racine and Christopher Culpo. His eclectic repertoire and his interest in jazz allow him to blend Bach’s Goldberg Variations, or Liszt’s transcription of the Symphonie fantastique with jazz-inspired pieces in the same recital.

In a period in which American nationalist music was developing with composers of the calibre of Aaron Copland and others trained in Europe, George Gershwin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, went some way towards bridging the wide gap between Tin Pan Alley and serious music. He won success as a composer of light music, songs and musicals, but in a relatively small number of compositions he made forays into a new form of classical repertoire.

French, of paternal Swiss and maternal Basque descent, Ravel combined skill in orchestration with meticulous technical command of harmonic resources, writing in an attractive musical idiom that was entirely his own in spite of contemporary comparisons with Debussy, a composer his senior by some 20 years.

The son of a distinguished Russian singer, Stravinsky spent his earlier years in Russia, either in St Petersburg or, in the summer, at the country estates of his relatives. He studied music briefly with Rimsky-Korsakov but made a name for himself first in Paris with commissions from the impresario Diaghilev, for whom he wrote a series of ballet scores. He spent the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in Western Europe and in 1939 moved to the United States of America. There in the post-war years he turned from a style of eclectic neoclassicism to composing in the twelve-note technique propounded by Schoenberg. A versatile composer, inventive in changing styles, he may be seen as the musical counterpart of the painter Picasso.