557293bk Illarionov US 09/07/2003 1:19 pm Page 4 Dimitri Illarionov Dimitri Illarionov is one of the most brilliant classical guitarists of his country. In 1997 he graduated with honours from the Academic Music College at the Laureate Series • Guitar Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where he studied with Natalia Dmitrieva, continuing at the Russian Gnesin Academy with the famous performer and professor Alexander Frauchi. In 2002 he graduated there summa cum laude, and since October 2002 he has served as an assistant to Professor Frauchi. Dimitri Illarionov won the Grand Prix in the VIth International Promotional Competition Dimitri Guitar Talents’ Review (Gdansk, Poland, 1999) and the title of The Greatest Hope in the Xth Gdansk Meeting of Guitarists. In 2000 he won the First Prize in the most prestigious Russian International Guitar Competition, Guitar in Russia Illarionov (Voronezh, Russia). He is the laureate of numerous international competitions. His awards include the Second Prize in the IIIrd International Competition of Musical Personalities Alexander Tansman (Lodz, Poland, 2000), laureate of the First Prize: VIIth International Classic Guitar Competition Printemps de la guitare 2000 (Charleroi-Seneffe, Belgium), laureate of the XIth International Biannual Guitar Competition in Kutna Hora (Czech Republic, 2002), laureate of the International 2002 Guitar Foundation Competition Classic Heritage (Moscow, 1997) and winner of Moscow Guitar competition (1997). In October 2002 Dimitri Illarionov won the most prestigious of America Competition guitar competition in the world, the Twentieth International Guitar Foundation of America Solo Guitar Competition (GFA – Miami, Florida, USA). Part of this award is in the form of the present Naxos recording, with a concert tour in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and a concert video recording. His repertoire is broad and varied, including original guitar music of different periods and styles, the unique cycle 24 Preludes and Fugues for Solo Guitar by Igor Rekhin, as well as compositions for guitar with orchestra, lute music, and other works. He has GUITAR RECITAL recorded with Boris Andrianov, one of the most gifted young Russian cellists, and has an active concert life, performing as a soloist with orchestras and playing solo recitals. In addition to numerous appearances in Russia, he has given concerts in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Poland, Japan and Germany, with a solo concert at one of the world’s major guitar events, the Nürtingen Festival in Germany. GIULIANI • TANSMAN DYENS • REKHIN KOSHKIN • TARREGA CASTELNUOVO- Acknowledgements: With thanks to my mother Natalia, Serge and Val Illaryonov, my teachers Natalia Dmitrieva TEDESCO and Alexander Frauchi, Ivan Illarionov, NLK and numerous others for their support and help. 8.557293 4 557293bk Illarionov US 09/07/2003 1:19 pm Page 2 Dimitri Illarionov - Guitar Recital they represent a severe test, musical and technical, for grace than Paganini ever achieved. One of these Giuliani • Tansman • Dyens • Rekhin • Koshkin • Tárrega • Castelnuovo-Tedesco the performer. foreshadows the mood of the slow movement of his It was with his ground-breaking suite The Prince’s Guitar Concerto No.1 (1939). In a passage near the end Mauro Giuliani was born in the southern Italian “first wipe your pen clean” before writing for the guitar. Toys that the Russian guitarist-composer Nikita there is a quotation from Paganini’s La Campanella, in province of Bari – the exact place of his birth is not From his first response (the Mazurka of 1925) onward Koshkin first presented himself to the guitar’s world as which Castelnuovo-Tedesco makes his only direct known. Neither do we know by what means he acquired Tansman did as he was asked. The Cavatina (1950) is a a composer of great imagination, with a taste for reference to the work’s dedicatee. his abilities with the guitar, flute and violin, so that by suite of dances which recalls but does not quote from programmatic music (often involving fairy tales and Although Francisco Tárrega, the so-called father of the time he moved to Vienna in 1806 he was already music of earlier times, albeit in Tansman’s own mystical creatures) and for his skilful use of special the modern guitar, wrote many charming and recognised as a virtuoso guitarist and had toured in economical terms. The Danza pomposa was added effects, to the armoury of which he has contributed beautifully constructed miniatures, his larger works Europe. There was then little prospect of making a later, to provide a stronger ending to the work. liberally. Marionette was composed as the set piece in were designed rather to impress the audiences in the rewarding career as a soloist in Italy (especially in the Roland Dyens was born in Tunis but musically the senior division of a competition in Voronezh in salons that were his usual habitat. His sets of variations, area of his birth) but the situation in Vienna was entirely educated in France. As a guitarist he has won many 1996. It depicts the jerky, un-smooth movements of a including those on The Carnival of Venice, a theme different. There he soon became very successful, international awards and gained a wide reputation as an puppet. Koshkin says “That is all I can say. The rest is much beloved by cornet players, deploy a range of the meeting famous composers such as Beethoven, Diabelli improviser, an aptitude that may stem from his ethnic in the music”. We may safely leave it at that. special effects of which the guitar is capable, a few of and Hummel. He worked as a performer and composer origin since extemporisation is the essence of middle- Many years ago I ran a correspondence course which are of dubious musical value. These works were and even played the cello in the first performance of eastern music. The French word skaï means ‘artifical which, according to one overseas subscriber “renders doubtless greatly enjoyed in the salons, but today, as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Segovia once leather’ – something glossy, cheap and cheerful, and not the execution of difficulty easily”. So successful was here, they serve to show just how far guitar music has described Fernando Sor as “garrulous” but how might quite the real thing. As used in his best-known work, Paganini in creating this impression in his performances progressed in the last century. You may enjoy this one refer to Giuliani, who published over a hundred Tango en skaï, the Valse en skaï proclaims it a good- that his listeners believed he was in league with the present one in much the same way as you would when works during his sojourn in Vienna. In 1819 he escaped natured parody of the real and familiar thing – the waltz. devil. It is to this that the title of Mario Castelnuovo- watching gondoliers ‘accidentally’ fall into the canals the unwelcome attention of the police, after problems The distinguished Russian composer Igor Rekhin Tedesco’s Capriccio diabolico (Homage to Paganini) during the real-life Carnival of Venice. with women and money, by returning to Italy, where he was born in Tambov. He studied composition with (1935) refers. It also relates to those passages in the managed to resume his high-profile success. The Aram Khachaturian in Moscow, composition and work which frame others of tranquillity and more lyrical John W.Duarte Grande Ouverture, a single-movement in sonata- musicology with Vladimir Tystovich and Alexander allegro form, was in fact published in Milan in 1814, Pen-Chernov in St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), while he was still in Vienna, and it remains one of his and took a post-graduate course in the Moscow finest works. As a ‘miniaturised’ version of an Italian Pedagogical Institute. He is the author of many reviews operatic overture it may be seen as a gentle parody. and articles, has produced many programmes for radio, By the time Alexandre Tansman moved from his worked extensively as a teacher and a juror in many native country of Poland to settle in Paris in 1919 he had national and international competitions, and has been already achieved some success as a composer and awarded a number of honours. His compositional output pianist. There he became acquainted with Ravel, covers music for a very wide range of media, including Milhaud, Honegger and other established composers. a wide variety of works for and involving the guitar. His works were soon adopted by Stokowski, Dimitri Illarionov gave the European première of his Koussevitsky and Mengelberg, and his world-wide Second Guitar Concerto in Gdansk in 2001. The 24 tours began. During World War II he lived in and Preludes and Fugues (1984-90), the only such cycle to worked in the United States, returning to Paris in 1946. be written for the guitar, were dedicated to and first It was in the early 1920s that he met Andrès Segovia performed by Vladimir Tervo. Rekhin says of it “I did who, though he was seeking new works for the guitar, my best to capture the ideas of contemporary musical was aware of Tansman’s ability to write in any musical culture and condense them into a cycle. I often language from the romantic to atonality; as a dyed-in- consciously admixed the classical and avant-garde and the-wool romantic, this made Segovia apprehensive. united them with elements of jazz, rock music and Thus, when he asked Tansman for a work he added: Latin-American rhythms”. It remains only to say that 8.557293 2 3 8.557293 557293bk Illarionov US 09/07/2003 1:19 pm Page 2 Dimitri Illarionov - Guitar Recital they represent a severe test, musical and technical, for grace than Paganini ever achieved. One of these Giuliani • Tansman • Dyens • Rekhin • Koshkin • Tárrega • Castelnuovo-Tedesco the performer.