Concert in Kraków is the original 'Fly On The Wall' album project. A recording of British classical guitarist Stewart French, it was made in June 2006 following an intense period of nightly performance films and presented here, for the first time, as a live session performance in 2026. Conceived as the capture of an idealised recital — recorded as two complete performances, under the governing reference of Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert — the sessions set out the editorial principles that would later organise French's film practice Fly on the Wall.
Concert in Kraków was not recorded in Kraków. Stewart French recorded the sessions in the UK in June 2006, at the end of a tour of his Transcriptions & Originals project, a programme he had filmed nightly for two months and whose final outing in Kraków had been cancelled. The project came at a formative point in his recording career: in 2005 he had recorded John Rutter's Shadows for Naxos and The Gift of Music for Universal, and in 2010 he would record Tarik O'Regan's Acallam na Senórach for Harmonia Mundi USA. With Concert in Kraków, French was experimenting with self-imposed studio constraints — testing how the discipline of live performance, imposed on the studio, could produce different kinds of recordings. The record was conceived as the capture of an idealised recital, under the governing reference of Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert. The methodology that would later become the organising principle of French's practice Fly On The Wall is already present in these sessions, twenty years before it took that name.
The recital traces a single arc from transcription to original composition. 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 as an urtext transcription, concentrating on preserving the internal counterpoint of the work. Regondi's Air Varié, a touchstone of the 19th-century guitar repertoire, opens the originals — followed by Walton's Five Bagatelles For Guitar. The two Brahms Intermezzi from Op. 117, in French's own arrangements, close the record as paired encores.
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 scholarly edition French prepared from an original autograph manuscript, with reference to the published Bream edition, and Walton's later orchestral treatment in Varii Capricci. French's edition and this recording are referenced in the William Walton Edition, OUP's scholarly edition of the composer's complete works. The manuscript of the fourth movement is of particular interest, conceived in a different key to the published Bream Edition and representing perhaps the purest view of Walton's musical conception.
Bach's Chaconne for solo violin — “a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings”, in Brahms's phrase — is presented as a single polished take in French's guitar transcription. As French has put it: “The Chaconne is one single experience that takes the listener through the entire spectrum of human feeling. To cut between takes would be to cut the journey itself. The harmonic ground, the gathering of variations, the rests and the silences — they all depend on the unbroken span of a single performance.”
The 2026 edition releases the original session recording for the first time. Originally released in 2006 in limited distribution as a fully edited album, Concert in Kraków is reintroduced here without the safety ropes: the original uncut session performances that would become Fly On The Wall.
