Claude Debussy's piano music plays a central role in his compositional oeuvre. Debussy combined Russian as well as Oriental and East Asian influences with his admiration for Bach and the French harpsichord masters to create a relatively compact body of work. The classical contours and absolute clarity of Debussy's musical forms and the unity and self-contained character of his work, for which he owed a great debt to Rameau, contradict the widely held association of his music with vague, indistinct impressionism, which Debussy vehemently rejected. Debussy's music is characterized by it's refinement of tone colors, transforming sound into a unique and highly nuanced world of expression. Debussy's emphasis on tone color is directly linked to his harmonic style: while being neither attached to tonality nor leaving it entirely behind, Debussy transcended the formative effect of functional harmonic relationships through the use of chromaticism, and pentatonic and exotic scales. Mario Haring was born into a German-Japanese family of musicians in Hanover Germany in 1989 and grew up in Berlin. He began playing violin and piano at the age of three and began receiving formal piano lessons in 1994. As a soloist and chamber musician, Mario Haring has won sixteen first prizes at music competitions all over the globe.