Joaquín Clerch "Memories from Belgrade"

I got to know Belgrade in 1985. When I left this beautiful city, I felt deep sadness that you have in your youth when leaving something you loved. It was one more lesson that helps you understand that not everything you love accompanies you in life.

During my visit to Belgrade in 2018 I met Mrs. Aleksandra Mitrovic, who took me to the concert hall where in 1985 the guitar competition was organized, in which I also participated. While I was in that place, I realized that the emotions had never abandoned me.

Thanks to Aleksandra, I also got in touch with maestro Bojan Suđić, who, together with the director of Guitar Art Festival Boško Radojković, took a chance on my work and that is how we finalized the project of writing this piece. I also have to mention that an inevitable part of my memories is one of my dearest maestros - Costas Cotsiolis, for whom this piece originally should have been written.

That is how the idea of recreating Balkan themes, for which I have great admiration, emerges. As a curious fact, the name Matanzas is inluded in the name of the second movement. The reason is that this Cuban city in its past was called the Athens of Cuba. Costas recommended that I use the theme of Đurđevdan in the second movement, telling me that this would be more beautiful than Aranjuez (something impossible). That is why the first three notes played by the clarinet in the second movement represent a quote from the famous concerto. In the end, I used four Balkan themes which I entwine with my world of sound. There would be many things I could talk about, but I prefer them to be found through music.

This concert is dedicated to Guitar Art Festival and to its director and founder Boško Radojković, who managed to make an authentic and unique festival in the last two decades, where the guitarists from the whole world gather, spend some free time together, improve themselves and, motivated in that way, make new guitar pieces, which become a contemporary guitar heritage of the whole world.

I do not wish to end without thanking the maestros Marco Tamayo, David Martínez and Rafael Aguirre for helping me and accompanying me at this concert.

Infinitely grateful,

Joaquín