Efforts to persuade guitar-lovers to embrace the unfamiliar are all too often box office failures or produce, at best, minimal profit. No such effort is represented by this recording of 'These you have loved', aimed fairly and squarely at archetypal consumers of lollipops, especially those who dream of playing their favourite pieces with the same flawless freedom as Pepe Romero, a virtuoso to whom all things seem to come easily. There is a touch of Latin fire in Celedonio (Pepe's father) Romero's Tango Angelita (his mother's name), Lauro's music is properly steady-paced and cheerful, and there is both incision (in Elogia de la danza) and unassumed tenderness in Brouwer's pieces. The rest receives as much elastic romanticizing as good taste permits, but this sits strangely on the Waltz of Barrios, singularly lacking in brio and radically different in approach from that of the composer, whose 1925 recording of it is readily obtainable on a Chanterelle cassette. Barrios's recordings are the earliest known by any guitarist, the oldest dating from pre-1910. On the other hand Romero plays La Catedral far more cleanly than Barrios did in 1925.
Quite simply, this is a record for those who just love the sound of the guitar and many of its most oft-played Albumblatter, delivered with the fluency one expects of players of other instruments—but rarely gets from guitarists—and recorded with the greatest clarity and, a Romero characteristic, an absence of ghostly sounds caused by the left hand's movement along the strings.'