La Joie

Here you see the amazing guitar Duo SEMPRE - Arsen Asanov and Dariya Panasevych - with my Suite La Joie. For me this is one of the best videos of my pieces - wonderfully played and filmed.
The story behind it is quite romantic:
In 1995 I was studying music at the Academy of Music in Hamburg and I fell in love with a fellow student named Angela. She played the guitar and had a guitar duo, so – what was a composer to do? – I wrote a suite for her guitar duo, LA JOIE (Joy). It was, as you can easily hear, inspired by my love for Ravel, Débussy and Roussel, but the fundamental reason for this work was my hope (“espérance”: the name of the 4th movement) of getting closer to her ... Unfortunately, she never fell in love with me, her guitar duo dissolved, and that might have been the sad end of the story. But I never forgot the piece I wrote back then because I liked it so much. And as fate would have it, I met the Duo Sempre – Arsen Asanov and Dariya Panasevych – at the farewell concert of the Flanders Recorder Quartet in Oldenburg in December 2018, where I mentioned my piece, and then sent them the score. Of course, it was handwritten (in 1995 PC’s were as uncommon as a thing called “E-mail”), so I had to transfer it to my Sibelius software first. And one year later, on the 24th of November 2019, the premiere of La Joie took place in Hamburg, and now you can see this here on Youtube. Music never gets lost!
I am thankful and happy that, twenty-four years after its composition, La Joie has been performed by these two excellent, award-winning, and deeply warm-hearted musicians.

You can order the music sheet La Joie HERE.