The guitar now flourishes in eastern Europe and, as this recording makes clear, it has been doing so for longer than most people realize. The abrupt, musical gear-changes are symmetrically arranged: romantic/modern/folk-tune settings/modern/romantic. A. Nemerovsky (19th-20th century), strikingly anticipating Villa-Lobos whilst still sounding utterly Russian; Marek Sokolovsky (1818-83; Polish), full of cosmopolitan charm; and Alexsandr Ivanov-Kramskoi (1912-73), the 'father' of the guitar in post-Second World War Russia (whose daughter I recently met in Hungary), together with Sor, furnish the conservative frame with music that is as worth the hearing as much written elsewhere in its times. So what is Sor, an exiled Spaniard, doing there? Well, he lived in Russia for three or four years from 1823 and at the end of his composing life he wrote this sentimental remembrance of the fact, using two Russian folk-tunes but with no musical accent other than his own. The centrepiece consists of nine children's songs (collected by Bartok and Kodaly) delightfully set for solo guitar by Reszo Sugar, Hungarian in every way. Not the least surprising thing about Sandor Jemnitz's Trio for violin, viola and guitar (a genuine trio, not a guitar-accompanied duo) is that it was written as early as 1934—from whom did he learn to write so expertly for the guitar at that time? Schoenberg and Stravinsky have shares in this thrustfully energetic work, one whose neglect is not easy to understand or to justify.
If one were seeking three unlikely musical bedfellows, then the trombone, piccolo and guitar would do nicely, yet Gyorgy Kurtag's Trio (1979) cocks a snook at such scepticism. Kurtag is a Romanian-born Hungarian who has studied in the West but his Trio touches its cap to Mussorgsky and Stravinsky in its first movement and the latter in its angular, Pulcinella-tinged Scherzo. This is the kind of exposure the guitar currently needs and Starobin is exactly the kind of player it requires; he has been equally adept in choosing his fellow travellers to the East. Top-class recording and good annotation round off a compelling issue.'