Stepan Rak is a brilliantly virtuoso guitarist and an ingenious inventor of sounds that one never dreamed could be drawn from the instrument. His many admirers in the guitar world can be assured that Balalaika is an extended tremolo study of spectacular difficulty, that Era of Rock and Roll uses the mannerisms of that era with such aggressive showiness (including loud percussive effects on the body of the instrument) that it would raise the roof of any concert hall you care to name, that the Spanish suite and Homenaje are like the most taxing bits of Tarrega you can think of but with knobs on, and that the two extended 'guitar tone-poems' in Vladimir Mikulka's collection (Voces de profundis and The last disco) are replete with pinging high harmonics, vivid imitations of flexatone and musical box and a strange sound suggestive of mice scurrying over the strings. What about the rest of us, though?
Well, in the collection called ''Dedications'' Rak demonstrates a pretty talent for pastiche. The Early dances are precisely that: fake renaissance lute music, but with an agreeable plaintiveness and an occasional faint but piquant East European spicing. In Mikulka's collection the Variations are rather similar; Jaromira Klempire's theme is from the music to a film about King Charles IV (of where? who knows, but he was a long time ago, that's the main thing) and a pleasant sequence of ancient airs and dances is the result. One of the best pieces in either collection is the seventieth-birthday card addressed to our own JD, a fantasy on the most obvious tune for such an occasion, together with a few bars by JD himself, both used with a real pleasure at their twistability into unexpected formations. There's the rub, I suspect: Rak the composer is at his best when using a pre-existing tune or imitating a pre-existing style. His 'own' music tends towards the painstaking exploitation of technical effects or to tunes that faintly remind you of other, better ones (I came away from this pair of CDs whistling The Carnival of Venice, Home, sweet home and that theme from Dr Zhivago).
The 'tone-poems' simply won't do, I'm afraid. Voces de profundis contains a prodigious repertory of invented sounds but precious little music; The last disco has tunes as well, but not good ones. Enthusiasts of extended guitar technique will probably have to have both collections, though Mikulka's has the highest eyebrow-raising quotient. Those who prefer a little music to season their astonishment had better opt for the Nimbus disc. Both are cleanly recorded, though GHA/Koch International place Mikulka (hardly less amazing a technician than Rak himself) almost as close to the listener as he is to his instrument.'