Androne-Nakanishi , Sebastian

Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi – „Lan Huahua – The Dark Blue Flower”

Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi (b. 1989)
Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi is a multi-award-winning composer who writes both contemporary concert music and soundtracks for theater or film. He studied music composition in Romania, Great Britain and France. His music is being performed all around the world by established ensembles and orchestras. He finished his PhD in 2018 at the National University of Music from Bucharest, with Dan Dediu as his doctoral adviser and long-time mentor. At the same institution he taught composition, orchestration and musical forms. Obtaining two Erasmus scholarships, he studied composition with Stefano Gervasoni during his doctoral studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse and with Joe Cutler, Howard Skempton and Ed Bennett during his Masters at the Birmingham Conservatoire. Convinced of the idea that there is always room for improvement, Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi attended in numerous masterclasses lead by important composers such as Mark-Anthony Turnage, Isabel Mundry, Agustín Fernández, Brian Ferneyhough, Richard Ayres, Christopher Fox, Mario Garuti, Laurence Crane, Hanna Kulenty, Errollyn Wallen, Gavin Bryars, Thierry Huillet, Cornel Taranu, Michael Hersch, Gabriel Iranyi, Jörg Widmann, Peter Ruzicka, Adrian Pop, Bernard Cavanna, Miklós Maros, Zygmunt Krauze, Hubert Stuppner, Philip Cashian and Aurel Stroe. In 2018, out of 304 participants from 44 countries, he won the Golden Eye trophy offered by the Zürich Film Festival through its international film music competition for his score for Steve Cutts’ short film „Happiness”. He won over 20 international and national composition awards and prizes among which there is the Tenso Young Composers Award 2015 or the George Enescu Grand Prix, symphonic section.

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„His works are full of youthful energy, written with impeccable professionalism! He succeeds to convey powerful emotions through a diverse and surprising musical language that is always fresh.”
Dan Dediu, composer

„Sebastian Androne is a highly gifted Romanian composer (…) who combines a highly vivid musical imagination with outstanding technical realisation. His music has a huge personality and energy. He creates striking musical structures that communicate clearly and powerfully.”
Joe Cutler, composer and head of the composition department at the Birmingham Conservatoire

About „Lan Huahua – The Dark Blue Flower”

After delving deep into research about the traditional song of Lan Huahua, I’ve arrived to a point in which I almost felt that I met this character. I tried to see with her eyes, to feel what she felt, to empathize with her and then to express through music a sort of a musical portrait, the quintessence of what I understood from the story of Lan Huahua. It’s a depiction of inner fracture, a consequence of extremely heart-rending events that shatters oneself, a state that does not necessarily imply hopelessness, but merely the emergence of a tabula rasa, of a new status quo. The vast majority of my music material derives from the theme of Lan Huahua, a theme that I tried to insert it in the genetic code of the piece. The erhu/violin does not play a regular soloistic role, as you will notice from the beginning of the piece. It is just another medium through which the music unfolds. The title was very difficult to find. The name of this astounding character had to be present, due to its massive role in the fabric of music (including the musical cryptogram LAN HUAHUA, translated into the motif: E-A-G A-G-A-A-G-A). But leaving only the name was not enough either. So, in the end, I decided to include the link of her name with a certain flower, including the appealing chromatic of the dark blue flower. The 10 minutes piece had its premiere in Shanghai, being performed by the Shanghai Philharmonic in 2017.

For performance material, and more information:
https://www.sebastianandrone.com