Camille El Bacha is a pianist, composer and improviser. His father is the pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha, and they often perform together as a duo, but Camille charts his own path between classical, film and electronic music, with his group Leone Jadis. He launches our ‘Piano Stories’ series with a programme entitled ‘Lumen’, which he presents as a ‘constellation of preludes and improvisations’. His own compositions resonate with the preludes of Bach and Chopin, taken from the two books of The Well-tempered Clavier and the Twenty-four Preludes op. 28 respectively. Camille El Bacha invites us on a journey where styles and periods merge into a single artistic impulse: ‘At the piano, I move almost unconsciously from interpretation to composition or improvisation. A Chopin prelude can inspire me to improvise, which can then lead to a new written piece.’
