JUNE

Description

Judicaël was to be sixteen years old. By chance, two concert tickets were offered by the magazine Télérama to the first who would solicit them. This is how accompanied by his father, Judicaël discovers Nikita Magaloff; the pianist plays Chopin at Salle Pleyel. Upset by this concert, he begins to frequent the library of Beaubourg. His favorite recordings are Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas by Serkin, Schubert’s impromptus by Brendel and Chopin studies by Pollini. The concerts will be for later, when his resources allow it.

A few years later, a walk in Paris with a guitarist friend brings the two young people in front of the Théâtre de la ville where a recital by pianist Sviatoslav Richter is announced but unfortunately sold out. However, an elderly lady approaches them and offers to buy the seats from two friends who are unable to attend the concert. They soon find themselves sitting next to the lady. She tells them that she was present, still a child, at the funeral of Scriabin. It was not long before fleeing the Russian revolution with her family.

Richter plays in total darkness, helped by a page turner and a small lamp to illuminate the score. He continued without intermission Prokofiev, Ravel and Scriabin; an absolute shock, a ghostly atmosphere, floating shadows, an exceptional concentration in the audience. At the end of the concert, the old Russian lady was the only person allowed to join Richter in his dressing room.

JUNE is part of Tchaïkovsky’s Les saisons opus 37a. Initially, the twelve pieces are published one by one as a supplement to a monthly music magazine in Saint-Petersburg. At the request of his publisher, each month Tchaikovsky composes an evocative piece illustrating the month concerned. The sweetness of June inspires the composer a barcarolle in G minor whose nonchalant melody is interrupted by a short allegro giocoso central in the major mode. The original key is changed to D minor in this arrangement for guitar. The sixth string tuned in D makes the instrument particularly expressive thanks to its ambitus of three octaves and a fifth, making  an eloquent introduction to this album.

Rachmaninov’s Prelude opus 23 n°5, performed by Nicola Hall on her album Virtuoso Guitar Transcriptions (1), gave Judicaël a furious desire to add it to his repertoire. Unsuccessful attempts to make contact with the English guitarist postpone the realization of this project. In 2019, Antoine Fougeray offers Judicaël Perroy his arrangement of the coveted prelude but also that of the Prelude for the left hand of Scriabin.By the fabulous Russian composer, he also adapts two of the twenty-four preludes from opus 11 in homage to Chopin and the touching prelude opus 16 n°4. The timbres of the guitar, unusual in this context, as well as its expressive means very different from those of the piano, give a new tone to the pieces, immediately tested in concert.

Seduced by this approach, Atanas Ourkouzounov soon participates in the project that is emerging. In an evocative and concise style, the Bulgarian composer and guitarist writes in a few days Cinq postludes in homage to five prominent figures of Russian music. The miniatures are entrusted to the publishing house Fougeray recently created. Each postlude includes a quote: from Rachmaninov it is his Prelude opus 23 n°1, from Stravinsky his Circus Polka, from Tchaikovsky his Saisons opus 37a, June and February, from Prokofiev his Visions Fugitives opus 22 n°5 and from Scriabin his Prelude opus 74 n°1.

Dušan Bogdanović’s Sonata nr 2 for guitar (2) brings a powerful contrast to the album. The composer of Serbian origin develops his ideas in a very chromatic harmonic language varying between modal and polymodal, sometimes atonal and even neo-romantic in the scherzo. The sonata in four movements –allegro, lento, scherzo and allegro – presents frequent changes of measure, its metric is derived from the Balkan folklore (3), the dynamics are important and the suggestions of nuances and timbres are numerous. In addition, the importance of the different voices of polyphony requires the particular attention of the performer, as in the case of a fugue or ricercare. The dense writing and the expressive richness of this sonata make it a major work in the classical guitar repertoire.

The Variations on a Scriabin Theme by Alexandre Tansman appeared quite naturally as the obvious conclusion to this album mostly inspired by the Russian pianistic universe. As the basis for the six variations the Polish composer uses the guitar version of the fourth of Scriabin’s five preludes opus 16 by Andrés Segovia.(4) The latter avoids the six flats of the original key of E flat minor and opts for the more comfortable key of B minor on the guitar. This twelve refined bars prelude appears on an album recorded by the maestro in 1956. (5)

Since the Mazurka, the first piece for guitar that he dedicated to Segovia in 1925, Tansman, not being a guitarist, submits his manuscripts to him. Segovia adapts them to the peculiarities of his instrument, puts them on the program of his concerts, records them and has them edited. Tansman’s Variations on a Theme by Scriabin were written in 1972, when he was 75 years old; Segovia, who was almost eighty, was the dedicatee, but it was Alvaro Company who signed the revision and fingerings of the score published by Max Eschig the same year of its composition.

1 DECCA, 1991.

2 Commissioned in 1985 by Les concerts d’été en l’église de Saint Germain, Geneva.

3  Balkan rhythms consist of one or more binary groups combining with a ternary group.

4 Celesta Publishing Co, New York, NY, 1945.

5 DECCA DL 9832, 1956.