Contemporary old Style

Website(s) : http://www.hayrapet-arakelyan.de / http://www.fratrestrio.com / http://www.daviddeboorcanfield.org

A piece called “Concerto after Tshciakowsky” written in 2013 by David Canfield DeBoer and performed with piano.

Biography

Hayrapet Arakelyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1991. In 1999, he began studying saxophone with Alexander Manukyan at the Alexander Spendarian Music School. He had master classes with Theodoros Kerkezos, Jean-Marie Londeix, Vincent David, Arno Bornkamp, and Claude Delangle. He continued his studies with Daniel Gauthier at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne Germany. Since 2014 hi is studing at the Konservatorium Privatuniversiät in Vienna with Lars Mlekusch. Mr Arakelyan has been a D`Addario Performing artist (http://www.daddario-woodwinds.de) since January 2014. He is the First Prize winner of many international saxophone competitions, including the Saxophone International Competition in Nantes, the International Saxophone Competition in Carquefou, and the Yamaha Competition in Yerev

More information

Concerto after Tchaikovsky was begun on May 20, 2013 and completed the following August 18th. During the World Saxophone Congress in St. Andrews, Scotland in July of 2012, Australian saxophonist, Allan Yang, had approached the composer with the idea of writing something in the style of Tchaikovsky. Canfield had, up to that point, written works for saxophone modeled after Glière and Brahms, and before the writing of this concerto added Joplin, Poulenc, and Schumann to the list, so he was quite receptive to the idea of doing something in the style of the most-beloved of all Russian composers. Work on the piece had to wait, however, until the spring of 2013, due to other compositional commitments.

Concerto after Tchaikovsky is cast in the traditional three movements, and is very loosely modeled on Tchaikovsky’s much-loved violin concerto. Consequently, there is a cadenza in the first movement before the recapitulation, akin to that in the violin concerto. The listener will also note figuration drawn from the final movement of that work, but the movement also captures the spirit of the “Trepak” in the Nutcracker Ballet. The centerpiece of the concerto is a gentle slow movement in which the composer attempted to fulfill Yang’s request for a beautiful and lyrical melody.
Throughout the work, Canfield sought to evoke the spirit of Tchaikovsky through melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and orchestrational means. While there are no deliberate quotes from any of Tchaikovsky’s music, some of the gestures are likely to be found somewhere in his voluminous output. Recognizing that, as in other works in his “after” series, some of his own fingerprints showed up in the work, Canfield made no effort to suppress any vestiges of his own style in this
work as well.

Instrumentation: 2-2-2-2 2-2-0-0 Timp-1 strings