Est 1923

Guitar Recital

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Leo Brouwer, Isias Savio, Héctor Tosar, Manuel (Maria) Ponce, Jaurès Lamarque-Pons

Label: Decca

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 57

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 421 816-2DH

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Variations and Fugue on 'La Folia' Manuel (Maria) Ponce, Composer
Eduardo Fernández, Guitar
Manuel (Maria) Ponce, Composer
(El) Decamerón negro Leo Brouwer, Composer
Eduardo Fernández, Guitar
Leo Brouwer, Composer
Gandhara Héctor Tosar, Composer
Eduardo Fernández, Guitar
Héctor Tosar, Composer
Sonatina Jaurès Lamarque-Pons, Composer
Eduardo Fernández, Guitar
Jaurès Lamarque-Pons, Composer
Batucada Isias Savio, Composer
Eduardo Fernández, Guitar
Isias Savio, Composer
Segovia asked Ponce to write the Variations and Fugue on ''La folia'', in order to erect a 'monument' to Spanish music, but the theme received by Ponce had merely passed through Spain en route from Portugal to Italy and France (pace the annotator's account), and Ponce was Mexican. If the plinth was of dubious stability, the monument itself (to the twentieth-century guitar rather than to Spanish music) turned out to be the most substantial work of its kind for the guitar, sometimes referred to as the instrument's 'Old Testament'. Segovia himself recorded only some of the variations (no one now knows why) but others including Fernandez—the first to do so on CD—have omitted nothing of the printed score (edited by Segovia); neither have they been lured into trying to mimic Segovia. Fernandez is certainly not one to dress his interpretational self in other men's clothes and, though less lushly romantic than Segovia's, his views on the work are clear-cut, entirely musical, and not without warmth—sometimes contrasted with sounds whose mechanical and musical components keep, even more elsewhere in this recording, uneasy company.
The familiar favourite works of Brouwer and Savio come up smiling, framing others, by unfamiliar composers and unlikely to become everyman's favourites. Tosar's celebration of the tritone (its sub-title is Diferencias sobre si bemol-mi) is a derivative and almost predictable mix of gestures, two packages of which are separated by a minimalist screwing-up of tension, written a decade after the time of such exercises. I know nothing of Lamarque-Pons and it seems that the annotator is similarly underinformed (even his nationality is not vouchsafed), but his three trifles ('Sonatina' indeed!) dwell in the shadow of Piazzolla. This is then a very mixed bag, the core of which is Ponce's 'monument', played with great skill and character, the pristine recording of which brings those 'mechanical sound-components' into focus, rather than minimizing them.'

Guitar Recital

Variations and Fugue on 'La Folia'

(El) Decamerón negro

Gandhara

Sonatina

Batucada

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