“Imagination, poetry and an interior world are important to me in my work,” says Eric Tanguy, a composer whose captivating music is performed widely in his native France and around the world.

Born in 1968, Tanguy has produced a wide-ranging catalogue of some 100 works. The album In a Dream takes its title from a piece for violin and piano, one of the eight chamber works on its programme. Composed over a period of 20 years (1999-2019), they are performed here by violinists Alexandra Conunova and Rosanne Philippens, viola-player Lise Berthaud, cellist Edgar Moreau, clarinettist Pierre Génisson, pianists Suzana Bartal and David Kadouch, and string ensemble Quatuor Diotima. The titles that Tanguy gives his pieces are suggestively poetic rather than programmatic, but In a Dream also includes Spirales, Nachtmusik and Lacrymosa in addition to the more literal ‘Quintette’, ‘Rhapsodie’ and ‘Trio’.

Tanguy, himself an experienced violinist, studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris. He emphasises that he does not identify with any specific ‘school' of composition, such as spectralism, minimalism or serialism. Through Henri Dutilleux, who numbers amongst his mentors, he is in the line of French composers that runs from Debussy through Messiaen, but the great Finn Sibelius is another composer who holds a special place in his heart and aesthetic.

A distinguishing feature of Tanguy’s music is his use of families of modes, which, as he explains, are scales that can be traced back to antiquity and which characterise music of diverse cultures around the world. “They open up so many possibilities,” he says. “The permutations of intervals create a very particular colour and expressivity as you pass from one mode to another. There is rigour and purpose behind my music, but I don’t expect the listener to have to decode it… It’s the feeling that matters... I want listeners to bathe in the sonorities I present to them”.

“What is really fantastic is hearing performances by someone who has understood your music,” he continues. “This is the magical thing in an artistic collaboration – when you have a performer who is so involved and who brings out a lot in your music – that is the biggest joy to me.”

The French magazine Le Monde de la Musique described Tanguy – twice the winner of France’s Victoires de la musique classique award – as “one of today’s most engaging composers of serious music. His work is richly imaginative, superbly constructed and accessible to a wide audience.” The writer went on to praise Tanguy’s capacity for combining sensory appeal with dramatic tension, an observation echoed by the New York Times when reporting on an orchestral score that “quivers with exuberance and intoxication”. The distinguished Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose work Tanguy especially admires, has described him as “one of the major composers of our time”.

Eric Tanguy, now a professor of composition at two conservatories in Paris, studied with Horatiu Radulescu, Ivo Malec, Gérard Grisey, and Betsy Jolas and went on to win number of French and German prizes. He has been a composer-in-residence in France, Italy, Finland, the UK and the US (Tanglewood Music Center). His catalogue ranges from solo pieces and chamber music to concertos, vocal works and symphonies, and his music has been performed by such instrumentalists as Mstislav Rostropovich (who in 2001 premiered his Cello Concerto No 2), Piotr Anderszewski, Nicholas Angelich, Renaud Capuçon, Gautier Capuçon, Edgar Moreau and Emmanuel Pahud, and conducted by, among others, Semyon Bychkov, Seiji Ozawa, Michel Plasson, François-Xavier Roth and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Ensembles and orchestras that have played his works include the Arod, Arditti and Ysaÿe quartets, the Trio Wanderer, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio- France, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Tonhalle Orchestra and Sinfonia Varsovia.