Secret of the Lake
Rossen Balkanski Many guitarists and guitar teachers who like my music keep on asking me: “Have you written anything easier, anything which may be played without a lot of exercises, anything which suitable not only for us but also for our students?”
It is true that in last several years I created works like “Sonata for Guitar”, “Fantasia Concertante” for three guitars and orchestra, and in particular “Balkanska Sonata”, which are directed toward performers of a really high class and extensive experience. These are pieces which require a lot of practice and time to ripe, and I’m pretty sure that if they get into the hands of a student, he or she will have trouble just to read them.
For all of those who cannot yet meet the challenge of my works of scale, I offer something very special. A small treasure which hides a secret – the Secret of the Lake.
This is a suite for guitar I recently finished. It is my first composition which I wrote backwards from the end. At the beginning, the fourth and the fifth parts were just one piece which I dedicated to one of my young (only in age) students. With time I understood that the it is too short in order to express everything I had to say through my music. Thus more of the piece appeared later – “The Harp of the Wind” and “The Morning Rain” which awakens the roses.
The greatest challenge for me was to preserve, while composing a relatively simpler work with easy playing techniques, the poetic character of the music. It did work. This is a piece which will help students of the guitar not only with their technique but also with entering imperceptibly the mysterious world of music. And about the great performers? For them, there is just one thing to do: When they play this suite, to carry the audience to a place where the rain rustles through the leaves of the roses, where the wind lifts the mist veil above the lake, and reveals curious light spirits who give a timid peek. And there, in the deep, down there where the blue turns into black, a river flows. A river which sings the song about “The Secret of the Lake”...
Preview of an excerpt of this work: Open on the screen
Who is Rossen Balkanski? Read about the composer
|
ROSSEN BALKANSKI
|
