I am pleased to announce that today, September 20, 2024, my new album Suite française is released. This album is a collection of my original compositions for solo piano, recorded in Paris by pianist Paola Meloni.
The album will be available in a 100-copies limited edition CD on my Bandcamp page and on all streaming platforms in digital format.
Also on Bandcamp, together with the physical CD, the piano score of all the pieces in the album is available for purchase, both in a soft-bound physical copy and as a PDF. This is intended for people who play the piano, as the Suite française was written also with a pedagogical intent.
Birmingham, England, where I lived for many years, is the city where I composed most of the music on this album. The musical influences present in Suite française are numerous. They range from the piano music of late 19th and early 20th-century French impressionism, primarily Debussy and Satie, to the more modern minimalism of Yann Tiersen. My passion for Puccini is also evident (for example, in the heartfelt Une valse bretonne), as well as for Bach (the counterpoint in Ça ira bien and, reminiscent of the Goldberg Variations, the concept of opening and closing the suite with the same melody), for the Beatles (the endless tail of the final chord of the album, as in the closure of A Day in the Life), for contemporary atonal music (in À Dinard), for jazz (in Août), for the ukulele (whose tuning inspired some pieces like Ça ira bien and Pluie sur le visage), and for my own music (Dix-sept is a piano rewrite of my piece 17, a tribute to my birth date but also to numerology, an (un)lucky number of an age reflecting the beginning of maturity and of an artistic and spiritual journey still ongoing).
Paola Meloni, a Sardinian pianist living in Paris for many years, has interpreted my pieces with great naturalness and taste, perfectly matching my musical intentions, and following the flow of the musical material as in a true metaphysical journey.
Listening to music has always been like taking a journey for me, not just a journey through sounds, but a journey through the real and imaginary worlds of my favorite artists, as well as a journey through my own worlds, external and internal. I started writing music at the age of ten out of a desire to travel through these worlds, and to invite people listening to embark on this journey, in an exponential accumulation of experiences, inspirations, and suggestions.
But the Suite française also represents a real twenty-year journey for me, which began with a stay in Brittany in October 1997 (when I took the photo for the CD’s interior, the tidal flats at Mont Saint Michel) and concluded with a stay in Dinard in January 2018 (when I took the cover photo for the CD). A journey inspired by the passage of time and the changing of the seasons in northwestern France, where the element of water, in all its forms of fog, rain, river, tidal flow, sea, serves as the guiding thread of a metaphorical journey that moves from the warmth of the August sun through the autumn grayness, winter storms, and returns to serenity, in a continuous physical and spiritual cycle.
I hope you enjoy the listen!
Sebastiano
Listen and Buy on Bandcamp: https://sebastianodessanay.bandcamp.com/album/suite-fran-aise
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1PJ1jrYRtU0oaDiUc4YzNT?si=kcZ9wqpATnum0Wodr81uVQ
Listen on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_na_cOldUsVi-uHscyTThO6ah6806Uci3I&si=8bKAd8YUxGihTZeo