15 JEAN-BAPTISTE FONLUPT Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev were featured on your previous recording. Do you have a particular affinity for Russian music, and what is your connection to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, to whom you devote this new album? Jean-Baptiste Fonlupt: I don’t remember the moment I first discovered him. Sergei Rachmaninoff has always been there — I’ve listened to and played his music since my childhood. Later, my extended stays in Russia deepened my love for the country’s composers. I lived in Moscow in the early 2000s and studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory for a year. Since that time, I have had many opportunities to perform in concert there, notably at the Mariinsky Theatre. I have spent time in the Russian countryside, often invited by friends to their dachas. One can imagine that this countryside — still much as it remains today — this deep, ancestral Russia largely untouched by modernity, is the one Rachmaninoff knew. His attachment to his native land springs from it: from its small villages clustered around their churches, but also from everything that defines the country — its people, its seasons, its climate, and its traditions.
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