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Who or what inspired you to take up piano and make it your career?

I don’t remember much about what made me decide to play the piano and make it my life’s dedication, I only know that I always knew that I wanted to become a concert pianist.

I do remember getting a cassette tape with Chopin ‘Heroic’ Polonaise played by Ashkenazy and couldn’t get around how somebody could write something so beautiful and full of life.

Who or what were the most important influences on your musical life and career?

When I was in high school I met a classical guitarist who had a sensitivity and honesty as an artist which I had not seen. We would listen and discuss wonderful pieces of art in which he showed me delicacy in colour, shape and space which I didn’t think were possible. I was raised in a small coastal town in the Netherlands and in this seemingly non-artistic environment he was somebody who gave me the confidence to pursue the search for beauty.

Steven Osborne has been a big influence in the last years. He has helped me a lot, not only by his occasional mentoring but also seeing him perform and his work in seeking expression, character and technical confidence.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

I think the greatest challenge is still to come in securing a career and being able to reach a large audience in a world where classical music is still understood by a small number of people and where the artist has to deal with big political and intercontinental power shifts.

Which performances/recordings are you most proud of?

I have recently recorded my first disc. The things I have heard sound really good in terms of clarity and expression. But most proud am I to have been able to work with an incredible team – producer Andrew Keener and engineer Aleksandar Obradovic.

Which particular works do you think you perform best?

This is very difficult to answer: as an artist I am constantly looking to understand style and the composer’s score more and more thoroughly. Sometimes I have a pretty clear feeling of a particular expression in a particular style but realise that it couldn’t be the composer’s intention. It is a long search in which we must take our own life and experiences into account.

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

Depending to what certain halls and concert series have programmed and wish to listen to, I try to build a program in which I feel confident and in which the pieces have common ground in terms of expression and character.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

Not so long ago I performed in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The experience was truly wonderful because the hall and the acoustics worked together so beautifully. My concept of sound in certain passages was suddenly so much more achievable as the circumstances were perfect.

Favourite pieces to perform? Listen to?

I very much enjoy performing Schumann Allegro Opus 8. I love the tremendous drive and power of this particular piece. It brings so many questions to me which I don’t always know how to answer, and this is the beauty of it.

I am constantly return to listening to Buckner symphonies, they give me such a sense of space and structure. There something about these works that gives me clarity of mind in times when I need it.

Who are your favourite musicians?

There are a lot of musicians and artists in general whom I admire for their contribution to art and music. Each of them, in their personal view of music, has taught me things and changed or affected the way I see things nowadays.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

When I was living in Rotterdam the first concert I attended was Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the Rotterdam Philharmonic. The experience of such an incredibly powerful piece in a setting of a beautiful concert hall was something which has stayed with me.

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

I think the most important thing for young artists is to have a very clear idea of how to reach the younger generation, and to be able to show why art is a necessity for the well being of our internal life.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Hopefully that is when mind, body and spirit become one and there is complete peace of mind.

What is your present state of mind?

At the moment I consider myself having a clear state of mind as I am able to make deeply-felt artistic decisions. In a world which is captured by an economical crisis, political shifts, and is in need of a new vision towards our perception of how we experience art, I find myself sometimes overwhelmed by all the possibilities on the one hand and doubts on the other.

Cyrill Ibrahim performs at St James’s Piccadilly, London on 11th January at 1pm

Born in Rotterdam in The Netherlands, in 1984, Cyrill Ibrahim started playing the piano at the age of seven. One of his first mentors was Leonardo Palacios, a classical guitarist from Uruguay. He subsequently enrolled at the age of 18 at the Rotterdam Conservatory. He graduated as Bachelor of Music with Distinction.

During his studies, his tutors were Aquiles Delle Vigne, Barbara Grajewska and Marcus Baban. To his delight, Cyrill was loaned a grand piano by the Dutch Music Foundation during his studies in the Netherlands.

In 2009, the pianist Paolo Giacometti offered him a place at the Utrecht Conservatory to follow the Master of Music programme. He studied there for a year before moving to the United Kingdom.

Cyrill graduated from the Royal College of Music after undertaking the Master’s Degree in Performance under the tutelage of Professor Andrew Ball. The Dutch Government showed its faith in Cyrill’s skills as a pianist by offering him a full Huygen’s Scholarship for the entirety of his studies with the RCM.

He participated in the masterclass of the Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires at the Karma Ling Institute in France. In addition to this, he studied at the Birmingham Piano Academy, Chetham’s Summer School, the Lucca Estate and the Orchestral Conducting Course that is run by Antonio Ros Marba in Spain. Over the years, he has received tuition from, among others, Philip Fowke, Peter Donohoe, Ruth Nye, Matthias Kirschnereit, Dr. Robert Markham, Malcolm Wilson, John Humpreys and Katarzyna Popowa-Zydron.

He has performed both as soloist and a chamber recitalist on the national and international stage for such halls as the Berliner Philharmonie and Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Cyrill has had the privilege of working with the concert pianist Steven Osborne. In a magazine interview, he said of the pianist: “I recently met a talented young Dutch pianist called Cyrill Ibrahim, who has an intensity and openness that really impressed me. I think he could be someone really worth listening to.”

www.cyrillibrahim.com

 

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For the next four weeks, the Meet the Artist series will feature interviews with musicians who are supported by Talent Unlimited.

talent-unlimited-logoTalent Unlimited is a young charity that provides financial support to music students of exceptional talent but limited means. Talent, past performance and financial background are taken into consideration when assessing those who are selected for help.

Lack of funding leads many talented young individuals to abandon the field of music as it becomes impossible or at least cripplingly difficult to maintain their studies while working in various part-time jobs to survive. One has to have either rich parents or be incredibly lucky and resilient to flourish. Students have to pay exceptionally high fees when attending prestigious music schools and colleges in London and on many occasions by the time they reach post-graduate levels their resources have all but dried up. This is the point at which a charity like Talent Unlimited can be called upon for help.

Talent Unlimited, through its donations, concerts, conferences and other events aims at creating an environment conducive to the development of young musical talent.

More about Talented Unlimited here

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Who or what inspired you to take up composing, and pursue a career in music? 

A career in music is something I’ve always aspired to, since poking out simple original tunes on the piano as a child, which led to a long formal musical education, with piano at the centre. But other influences led to a career in finance and technology instead.

In my adult life, the impetus to take my hobby music a step further wasn’t any single individual but rather a whole musical community which thrived in the early days of music streaming platform SoundCloud.

It was the collective positive and encouraging response from like-minded music-makers which spurred me on to do something more. To pursue a serious and bill-paying career in music. 

This pursuit is strong and ongoing, and I find myself at a point where I have just resigned from 11 fruitful years at one employer, in a concerted effort to rebalance my efforts in the long-run.

Who or what were the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer? 

When watching a film, I am always more captivated by the sound and music than by the picture or story. I am pathologically distracted by it to the degree that I almost don’t notice the plot. 

And so my list of personal influences matches the list of the most celebrated film composers of our time: John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Howard Shore, Hans Zimmer, Alexandre Desplat, I couldn’t possibly complete the list of beloved and inspiring composers in this wordcount.

Bringing it a little closer to home though, there are several people in my circles who have successfully taken bold steps out of one career and into a career of composing for the screen. Outside of lucky breaks, it is an exceptionally difficult and long-playing effort to generate commercial success in music, but I see clearly now that it is in reach, whether or not you have a ‘backup’ career.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far? 

In a marketplace flooded with exceptional talent, getting your own work heard above the crowd, by people who hold the purse strings, is pretty much everyone’s ongoing challenge. It’s a challenge I haven’t addressed by any formal means of promotion, but I seem to have accidentally addressed it by simply being active, engaged and present in musical communities like SoundCloud, SCOREcast and some thriving Facebook groups.

One other challenge is time management. I feel lucky to have more work than I can handle right now, which means having to say no to things I would love to do, but not all of that work has immediate revenue. I’ve got a ton of work being live-recorded by strings players and singers but I won’t see a penny out of that for a year or more. The only way I can address that challenge is to judge incoming work on a balance of enjoyment and return on investment. Work which is both fun and high ROI comes first.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece? 

Mind-reading is both a challenge and a pleasure when working on a commissioned piece. Your vision will rarely match the vision of the commissioning director, so you make sure you have a high quality brief and have a first stab. Sometimes it’s a direct hit, and that really hits the reward centre of your brain, that you’ve successfully empathised with your director’s vision. Sometimes it’s version 9, and you’re just relieved it’s over.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles and orchestras?

My first experience combining live parts into a coherent whole was in online collaborations with musical friends on SoundCloud a few years ago. What a difference a single live part makes in an otherwise virtually arranged piece.

That experience led to my busy pipeline of remote session work on the piano. The baby grand in my professionally sound-treated studio is permanently mic’ed up for recording work for myself and other composers and I get a good stream of work via SessionExchange.org.

This year is a milestone year for me in live orchestral work. One family of production music labels requires and commissions live parts in strings and choirs and I’ve written around 30 pieces for it so far this year, some of which you can hear on my SoundCloud page. Many have been performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra players, up at Parr St studios in Liverpool, and many have been performed by a small ensemble in Vienna.

Which works are you most proud of? 

Oh dear, that’s like choosing your favourite child. 

If I judge it by number of plays, my trilogy The Muse has generated nearly half a million plays and still tugs my heartstrings when I play it to myself, given that the inspiration for them was a series of crises in my life. 

If I judge it by commercial success, that would by my improvisational solo piano album Won Love which peaked at number 2 in the iTunes UK Instrumental chart this year, behind Richard Clayderman. 

My current personal favourite is probably a single piece called Dystopia, a dark and epic piano/orchestral piece that was a lot of fun to write. 

Who are your favourite musicians/composers?

Having already listed my favourite contemporary composers, I’ll bring up my favourite historic ones here: Chopin was at the centre of my love of the piano and I’ve played over half his entire opus, including most of the Etudes, Ballades, Waltzes and Preludes. Rachmaninoff is a close second and of all the pieces I’ve enjoyed playing, one day I’d love to finish learning the 2nd piano concerto, which I abandoned after the fiery first and ‘easy’ second movement.

Other favourites include Liszt, Bruckner, Holst and Wagner, the latter 2 of which remain major influences of modern film scoring. 

What is your most memorable concert experience? 

I’ll take the audience seat of this question as opposed to the performance seat, where I’ve enjoyed playing in some concerts but it has not been a major feature of my musical career.  

From the audience seat, I will never forget the live performance and screening of Interstellar, with music by Hans Zimmer, at the Royal Albert Hall this year. Not only did the music blur my eyes almost throughout, but I also had a chance to see some of our generation’s most iconic people all in one place in one night as hosts of the evening: Stephen Hawking, Michael Caine, Kip Thorne, Brian Cox, and Hans Zimmer himself. 

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians? 

Some choose only to model others closely, some choose to express only their own voice. I don’t think the key to success lies in either extreme but in a balanced blend of the two.

To write music based on a template established by successful composers can only get you so far, soon you will blend in with the crowd and it will never be truly fulfilling. To write music expressing only your own voice may fulfill you artistically but the reality is that commercially successful music does demand a modicum of convention and a niche sound doesn’t always succeed.

Where the magic lies is in opening yourself to continuous learning from successful artists who have paved the way, accumulating the skills and musical vocabulary required to express your own voice in a well established medium.

What do you enjoy doing most? 

Entertainment is a bilaterally rewarding pursuit, where the entertainer can get as much pleasure as the entertained. In music, I thrive both ways, getting as much of a thrill creating a body of musical work as I do enjoying the creations of other musicmakers.

What I enjoy doing most is living music.

Oliver Sadie is a freelance composer and session pianist for film and tv, with an alter ego as a finance technology specialist. Operating from his purpose-built studio outside London, Oliver provides full-service soundtrack and song production, as well as live-recorded piano on demand.

With live orchestral parts performed by Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra players, blended with a full toolkit of virtual instruments, Oliver writes for production music libraries Gothic Storm Music, Lovely Music, The Library of the Human Soul, Getty Images Music as well as several non-exclusive online libraries. Some of Oliver’s portfolio of 500+ tracks can be heard at http://soundcloud.com/oliversadie.

On-screen credits include indie New Mexico film THE GARDEN (2015), upcoming UK action comedy film DEAD MEET (2016), independent Hollywood film GLASS PRISON (2013), sports documentary series SVEN DECKER, US slavery documentary MADMEN OR MARTYR, and a number of promotional and advertising spots for end-clients including Sony, Gärtnerbank, Black Bear International.