Pierre Sancan

Pierre Sancan (1916-2008) was a French composer, pianist, teacher and conductor. He was a major figure among French musicians in the mid-twentieth-century transition between modern and contemporary eras.

Sancan was most prominently seen in his role as accompanist to the great cellist André Navarra. As a piano teacher, Sancan helped train such luminaries as Jean-Philippe Collard, who has recorded Sancan's Piano Concerto. Some of his shorter piano pieces have caught on as specialty encores; in his music, Sancan sought strategies to reconcile expanded contemporary performance techniques with the harmonic language of Debussy, a composer of whom Sancan was an expert interpreter.