Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an amiable and prolific composer who devoted a fair share of his attention to the guitar (though he did not play it): there were a number of reasons for this of which Segovia's patronage was not the least. It was however for the duo Presti-Lagoya that he wrote his 'half-48', though they recorded only two of the pairings, and it was their alumni. Evangelos and Liza, who edited their publication in 1974, some 17 years after Presti's death. It cannot honestly be claimed that everything written by any prolific composer is of memorable quality and Castelnuovo-Tedesco was no exception. Bach compiled two '24s' but he did not do so in the same way: Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote this work in a remarkably short time, adding the date to each separate prelude and fugue! Such conscientiousness would have proved very useful to Bach scholars. Music flowed freely from him, a thing that was both to his advantage and his disadvantage; fluent speakers are often prone to platitudes, cliches and space-filling. His Op. 199 is, unsurprisingly, uneven in interest but it does display his gifts of melodic invention, refined expression and craftsmanship in abundance. Despite his opposition to being classified (he said he only wrote music and was not interested in 'isms' and 'ologies') he was quite simply, a classically disciplined romantic, and these preludes and fugues express no deeper emotion than one of wistful sadness.
The ordering of the pairings is curious, beginning with G minor and stepping up a fifth (or down by a fourth) each time until C is reached, major and minor modes alternating; the second 12 repeat the process, starting from G major. Canonic writing was a way of life to Castelnuovo-Tedesco and, in addition to the other traditional devices, he revels in it in the fugues (though not, abstemiously, in the preludes). The 'siblings' are occasionally thematically related, as in Nos. V, VII, XI and XII, and the wide-ranging subject of Fugue IX results in some very un-Bachian part-crossings. The considerable variety of textures is as much pianistic as guitaristic and does not, pace the sleeve-note, by any means exhaust the instrument's potential; it does however provide some very agreeable listening within the music's limited emotional gamut.
Duo Batendo were not previously known to me, nor, I suspect, will they be to many British listeners. They are commendably clean players, producing good basic tone (but with a little less variety than they might) and well able to handle what confronts them—C-T's music is seldom as easy as it looks or sounds. They do however fall short of reproducing (or sometimes even respecting) the composer's indicated dynamics, and are given to making rallentandos he doesn't ask for. The recording is of good quality but the sound is somewhat 'boxy' in places. This in an issue that should interest guitarists (not least archivally) but may be rather less absorbing to the 'listener in the street'.'