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The Concert Hour revisits a set of lost studio sessions from 2006 — performances by guitarist Stewart French that were, for years, thought to have vanished.
Recorded on two successive evenings in the resonant chapel of Clare College, Cambridge, the sessions were conceived in the afterglow of an extraordinary live recital: an attempt to capture, in the controlled space of the studio, the same sense of concentration and transcendence that defines a true concert experience.
Newly remastered in 2025, The Concert Hour reveals a musician in complete command of his craft, exploring music by Walton, Brahms, Bach, Regondi and Handel with focus, fire and delicacy. The result, long unseen and unheard, now stands as the genesis of a creative vision that would later unfold through French’s acclaimed Fly On The Wall project Fly On The Wall.
Stewart French Guitar
Cambridge 5-6 June 2006
23 January 2026
In the summer of 2006, Stewart French set out to recreate in the studio the atmosphere of a recital that had consumed his imagination for months. The performances were captured over two days in the chapel of Clare College, Cambridge, by engineer John Taylor, who later described the sessions as among the best-prepared he had ever witnessed. “The Bach Chaconne could have gone straight to disc,” he said after the second take.
The project was not about reliving the energy of the stage, but about preserving something far more private: the experience of French’s solitary, late-night performances in the deserted galleries of the Royal Academy of Music. Each evening he would close the door, enter the silence, and play for an uninterrupted hour — a personal concert of focus and release. In the Clare College sessions, he sought to capture that same sense of intimacy and transcendence, as if the listener were present for one of those hours alone.
He edited the album himself and issued a small run under the title Concert in Krakow — a poetic fiction that soon slipped quietly out of circulation. Nearly twenty years later, the tapes have been rediscovered and remastered, revealing the clarity, control and inner stillness of a guitarist at a pivotal point in his life.
With hindsight, The Concert Hour stands as the unrecognised beginning of the Fly On The Wall idea: the first exploration of how music, performance and documentation intertwine. Long before the cameras of the later series, these 2006 sessions captured the same fascination — how an artist listens to themselves, and what remains when the performance is over.
