Fabio Zanon, a Brazilian who has lived in London for some years, must now be acknowledged as a member of the highest echelon of living guitarists – an accolade I do not bestow lightly. His playing is marked by fluent technique, great beauty and variety of sound, finely controlled emotional response, and stylistic sensitivity. In short, he is an artist of the highest calibre. Tarrega’s miniatures easily overflow into sentimentality or caricature, but Zanon treats them with taste and affection. His majestic account of the Bach Sonata richly confirms this as a field in which the guitar has truly come to maturity; Zanon understands every stylistic and human facet of the music, and realizes it flawlessly. Bach is immediately followed by de Faria’s bleakly impassioned Eyes of a Recollection, a contrast heightened by Zanon’s vivid and technically spectacular performance; the guitar has few works of such intensity – and few players capable of projecting it without overt theatricality.
Mertz’s lengthy operatic pot-pourri – written in the wake of Giuliani’s Rossiniane – presented with taste and brilliance, comfortably manages not to outstay its welcome, which Giuliani’s do not always succeed in doing. There have been many good recordings of Ponce’s Tema variado y final, but none more fluent and finely shaded as this. The technical idiosyncrasies of the guitar make it hard for the listener to remain oblivious to them and to concentrate solely on the quality of the music and its interpretation: Zanon, for whom technical problems seem not to exist, enables one to do this with ease. Superb recording and good annotation (by Zanon) complete a memorable issue.'