Concert in Kraków

Concert in Kraków was not recorded in Kraków. Stewart French recorded the album in the UK in June 2006, in the weeks following a trip to Poland and his DipRAM recital at the Royal Academy of Music. The record was conceived as the capture of an idealised recital rather than the document of a single evening — recorded in complete takes, under the governing reference of Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert, with the editorial discipline of live performance imposed on the studio. The methodology that would later become the organising principle of French's film practice Fly on the Wall is already present in these sessions, twenty years before it took that name.

The programme is divided into transcriptions and originals, with a closing appendix of the performer's own arrangements. Handel's Seventh Keyboard Suite Overture opens the record in Russell's transcription, a version which has attained legendary status in the guitar repertoire. Bach's Chaconne follows in French's own arrangement, favouring minimal harmonic elaboration to concentrate on the internal counterpoint through which the work's emotional architecture unfolds. Regondi's Premier Air Varié and Walton's Five Bagatelles stand as the programme's originals. Two Brahms Intermezzi, in French's arrangements, close the record as the appendix — the transcription tradition of the opening carried forward by the performer himself.

The Walton occupies a particular place in the record's thinking. Commissioned by Julian Bream in 1970 and dedicated to Malcolm Arnold, the Bagatelles are presented in a new edition French prepared through analysis of the original manuscript, the Bream edition, Walton's later orchestral treatment in Varii Capricci, and the correspondence surrounding the work's composition. The fourth movement has been substantially rewritten. The edition attempts, as French wrote in the original notes, to untangle how Bream's distinctive playing and Walton's relative inexperience in guitar composition shaped the published work, and to recover aspects of Walton's initial conception.

At the programme's centre is the Bach Chaconne, recorded in four complete takes. The four-take method was an attempt to honour the work practically: no phrase could be salvaged from a later take unless the take as a whole held its own. The Brahms Intermezzi close the record by extending the transcription principle of the opening into the present, now through the performer's own hand.

The complete-takes discipline of the original sessions preserved the material in a form that allowed editorial decisions to be made later as well as at the time. The 2026 edition revisits the session material with the benefit of two decades of additional editorial experience, and presents each work in the form French now considers its fullest realisation. The record was originally released in 2006 on Draft Records in limited distribution; its reintroduction here is the first release on Fly on the Wall, the label French has founded alongside the film practice of the same name. The methodology of that practice — the capture of musical performance as a sustained act, minimally intervened with — is already present in these sessions. Concert in Kraków is both debut and origin.