Recent Releases Tuesday: CDs by João Carlos Victor, Frank Wallace, Simon Thacker & Justyna Jablonska

João Carlos Victor

Here’s our bi-weekly listing of some of the CDs that have come into the Classical Guitar office recently.

If you have a CD you’d like to submit to us, here’s our address:

Classical Guitar
501 Canal Blvd. suite J
Richmond, CA 94804-3505

Some of these will be reviewed in the magazine, some not. But we want to at least mention them all. You can listen to a lot of these on various of streaming services, but we always encourage you to support the artists by actually buying anything you like!

—Blair Jackson

To see our previous listings:

October 4: Jacob Cordover, Oleg Timofeyev and John Schneiderman, Arkaïtz Chambonnet, Matthew Fish, Gidi Ifergan

October 18: Norbert Kraft and Jeffrey McFadden, Steve Cowan, Katrin Endrikat, Jason Vieaux and Julien Labro, Yenne Lee, Emanuele Segre

November 1: Virginia Luque (and Bojidara Kouzmanova) Jon Gjylaci, Fabiano Borges, Alfonso Baschiera, Miscelanea Guitar Quartet, J.P. McShane

November 15: Antigoni Goni, Adam Levin, Radoŝ Malidžan, Black Cedar, Lou Marinoff, Antonio Malinconico

November 22: Marcelo de la Puebla, ChromaDuo, Carsten Pedersen, Thibaut Garcia, Yiannis Giagourtas


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December 13: Zsófia Boros, Andrea Bissoli, Philippe Sly & John Charles Britton, Carlos Dorado, and Steven Joseph

victor
Guitar Recital
João Carlos Victor
(Naxos)

Winner of the 2015 Tárrega International Competition, Victor—a Brazilian guitarist now living in Switzerland— plays a varied and quite serious program that includes four less-performed Tárrega pieces, as well as three Renaissance works by Dowland, his own arrangement of Rodrigo’s always-bracing Invocación y Danza, a lovely Castelnuovo-Tedesco sonata, and one world premiere: Paulo Rios Filho’s Répéter, a starkly modern piece with lots of effects and even some spoken-word.

Fantasia, P71 (Dowland), Invocación y Danza (Rodrigo); Barcarola veneziana (Tárrega); María (Tárrega); Marieta (Tárrega); Mazurca en Sol (Tárrega); Forlorn Hope Fancy (Dowland); Répéter (Rios Filho); Sonata ‘Omaggio a Boccherini’ (Castelnuovo-Tedesco); Farewell Fancy (Dowland)

Listen and purchase through Naxos or Amazon.

Check out this short promo video for the album, which really shows his skills:

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Omaggio: A Tribute to the Legacy of Segovia
Frank Wallace
(Gyre)

Versatile American guitarist/composer Wallace follows up his excellent Four Extraordinary Spanish Guitars disc with reliable pieces by Villa-Lobos, Falla, Turina, Tárrega, Mompu, and Wallace himself (an homage to Miguel Llobet), all played on an extraordinary German (Spanish-style) guitar built in 1931 by Hermann Hauser I and given to Andrés Segovia, who passed it to a violinist (and later, conductor) who had studied with him, Blanche Honneger. Powerful and well-played, as always.

Three Preludes (Villa-Lobos); Omaggio: Le Tombeau de Debussy (Falla); Homenaje a Tárrega (Turina); Four Pieces by Tárrega: Preludio #5, Adelita, Marieta, Capricho Árabe; Dreams on a Lullaby: Variations on Noi de la Mare (Wallace);Suite Compostelana (Mompou)

The CD can be purchased from Wallace’s Gyre label, with digital downloads available after January 7.

Here’s Wallace playing his Dreams on a Lullaby (on a different guitar):

simon
Karmana
Simon Thacker (guitar) & Justyna Jablonska (cello)
(Slap the Moon Records)

Scottish guitarist Thacker has been playing a thoroughly engrossing fusion of Western (modern classical, folk, jazz) and Indian music forms for some time, and this new recording—his first with his Polish cello-playing duo partner Jablonska—may be be his richest and most challenging yet (as well as perhaps his least overtly Indian-sounding). The six-part title piece alone is more than 30 minutes of fascinating modern music that goes in myriad unusual directions. There is a Polish folk tune (with violin and voice), another that features bizarre, a Highland ballad, backwards electronic manipulations a la The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, and, yes, one with tabla featured prominently. Thacker wrote all the original pieces and helped arrange the others. A feast for the adventurous listener!

Karmana; Obyrtac (trad. Polish); La Cârciuma de la drum (trad. Roma); An t-larla Diùrach (trad. Gaelic); Ruaigidh Dorchadas/The Highland Widow’s Lament; Aruna

You can hear generous samples and buy the album through Simon’s website.

The “Finale” from the Karmana suite give you an idea of what’s going on in this music: