Sebastien Letocart

Sébastien Letocart (в. 1975), composer/organ player was born in Verviers. He graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Liège in Belgium (1st prize organ, 1st prize harmony, 1st prize history of music, 1st prize musical analysis). Sébastien Letocart is a self-taught composer, who has built his musical equally by studying ancient music, practicing it (organ, harpsichord and singing) as well as analysing the great scores of the Classical Symphony, the Romantic, the Post-romantic, and the symphonic repertoire of the first half of the 20th century. He is also highly interested in the music of the last sixty years, his preferences are going from György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis or Esa-Pekka Salonen to Einar Englund, Aulis Sallinen, Emil Tabakov, Kalevi Aho, Vagn Holmboe, John Adams, Sir Malcolm Arnold or Sir Andrzej Panufnik. He is also greatly attracted by chamber music, especially by the refined writing that the string quartet demands and by Béla Bartók's six String Quartets. In 2007 -2008 S. Letocart realized a new completion of the Finale to Anton Bruckner's Ninth Symphony mixing a thorough study of the different extant up-to-date sources and musicologico-philological hypothesis, a reconstruction of the missing gaps in the exposition-development-recapitulation as well as music especially composed by S. Letocart rigorously and modelled on Bruckner's own orchestral and contrapuntal practices, particularly in the Finale's conclusion (coda). The first recording of this new completion of Bruckner's Finale was made in October 2008 with the MAV Symphonic Orchestra, Budapest under the conducting of Nicolas Couton Sébastien Letocart is also working on the orchestration of both books of Images for piano of Claude Debussy and L'Isle Joyeuse, using more or less the same orchestra as the one used for La Mer.