This is both a superbly executed recording and, considering the chronic conservatism of the species, one which is less likely to appeal to guitar aficionados than to those whose principal listening focus is on the music itself. Whether Britten and Yocoh were ever avant-garde composers is doubtful, but the titles of many albums are based on less than the whole of their musical contents. The Nocturnal lasts a little longer than usual but, in both its component movements and its overall conception, it is finely judged and dramatically telling. Yocoh's koto-haunted variations and Takemitsu's delicate miniatures are very different oriental faces of con- templation and are here given their appropriate time and space. The works by Brouwer and Torres (a young Colombian whose first guitar work this—astonishingly—is) are differently concerned with evolution—Brouwer's from the growth of a small cell, Torres's by the gradual transition of one pitch-group to another; this being in itself a gradual process, they too unfold in unhurried ways and both employ a strange array of effects. Berio is, on the contrary, concerned with the synthesis of disparate elements in his explosive Sequenza XI, dedicated to (but not yet recorded by) the equally explosive Eliot Fisk.
Fernandez is in supreme command of his demanding programme, both in the vividly recorded performance of it and in his understanding of it, expressed in the immaculate English of his annotation. Rarely can one wholeheartedly commend a guitar record to the attention of lovers of twentieth-century music, without reference to the instrument, but this is one of those occasions.'