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 some of these on various of streaming services, but we always encourage you to support the artists by actually buying anything you like!
To see our previous listings, scroll to the bottom of the page.
—Blair Jackson
Segovia: Guitar Music
Alberto La Rocca
(Brilliant Classics)
Highlighting Andrés Segovia’s largely unheralded gifts as a composer, Italian guitarist La Rocca has recorded about 70 minutes worth, including 11 preludes, a number of studies and 23 sketches of folk songs from such countries as Ireland, Russia, Poland, Finland, Serbia and several others. In the helpful notes (English and Italian), La Rocca writes: “The character of Segovia’s music is often intimistic [personal] and never succumbs to the virtuosity that one might expect from a concert player of his level; his poetic world was lyrical and introspective, occasionally tinged with an ironic or humorous touch.”
Once Preludios; Estudio en mi mayor; Estudio para Deli; Recordando a deli; Estudios; Estudio-vals; Estudio sin luz; Improntu; Two pieces; Veintitrés canciones populares de distintos países
Listen to the individual tracks on YouTube, Download from, iTunes or Spotify or purchase from Amazon.
Below is an evocative audio sampler from the CD, accompanied by photographs.
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Mauro Giuliani: Music for Two Guitars Vol. 1
Jeffrey McFadden and Michael Kolk
(Naxos)
Though the music is credited to the great guitarist/composer Giuliani (1781–1829) , about half of this superbly recorded and magnificently played disc consists of Giuliani’s arrangements of overtures (published in 1830) to operas by Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), including the very familiar and popular La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) and, of course, Il barbiere di Sivilia. The Giuliani pieces include a lively set of polonaises and more. It’s all quite lovely, stirring, and impeccably performed by this pair of Canadian virtuosos. Informative notes are by CG‘s always erudite Graham Wade.
Overture to Rossini’s opera ‘La gazza ladra’; Gran variazioni concertanti, Op. 35; Overture to Rossini’s opera ‘Il barbiere di Sivilia’; Overture to Rossini’s opera ‘La Cenerentola’; Overture to Rossini’s opera ‘L’aessedio di Corinto’; Variazioni concertanti, Op. 139; Tres Polanesi concertanti, Op. 137
Listen and purchase through Naxos or HBDirect.com.
This one also has a YouTube sampler with pics of the guitarist, composers and scenes from the operas:
Royal
Stefan Koim
(Musicaphon)
This disc by talented German guitarist Koim has an interesting concept: Putting works by Baroque lutenist/composer John Dowland (1563-1626) side by side with a pair of pieces by modern (though now-deceased) composers who were either explicitly influenced by and referenced Dowland in their work—as in Benjamin Britten’s famous Nocturnal After John Dowland, composed in 1963 and dedicated to Julian Bream—or implicitly in the case of Hans Werner Henze, whose challenging and at times jarring Royal Winter Music sonatas were based around characters in the works of Dowland contemporary William Shakespeare. (In his comprehensive notes, in English and German, Koim suggests that it is “inconceivable that [Henze] did not have Dowland’s lute music in his ear while composing his work for solo guitar.” Whatever the truth of that assertion, this disc works well as a whole, with old and new deftly linked in unexpected ways.
3 Fantasias: DP 71, DP 73, DP 1a (Dowland); Nocturnal After John Dowland Op. 70 (Britten); Sir John Langton’s Pavan (Dowland); Sir John Smith, His Almain (Dowland); The Most High and Most Mighty Christianus the Fourth, King of Denmark (Dowland); Royal Winter Music: Second Sonata on Shakesperean Characters (Henze)
You can buy the CD directly from Stefan Koim, or you can hear samples (and purchase) through JPC. Shipping to the U.S. might be expensive. We know of no U.S. distributor at the moment.
In the video below, Koim plays the “Sir Andrew Aguecheeck” movement of Henze’s Royal Winter Music:
Previous New CD 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
December 13: Zsófia Boros, Andrea Bissoli, Philippe Sly & John Charles Britton, Carlos Dorado, and Steven Joseph
December 27: João Carlos Victor, Frank Wallace, Simon Thacker & Justyna Jablonska