It is important for the guitar’s absorption into mainstream music-making, that the gap between lone recitalist and concerto soloist should be bridged; the two works by Crumb and Ruders, in which the guitar plays a concertante role, make a valuable contribution to that end.
Crumb’s work is an eight-movement sextet in which he uses a remarkable variety of instruments to produce haunting sounds. His ‘quest’, prompted by quotations from Dante and Lorca, is “a long tortuous journey towards an ecstatic and transfigured feeling of arrival”, in which interjected phrases from Amazing grace have a moving effect akin to that of the Bach chorales in Berg’s Violin Concerto and Takemitsu’s Folios.
The title of Ruders’s 11-movement Psalmodies has “no specific religious content or aim”; he compares its message with that of his First Symphony, Of Joy and Grief; of Worship and Oblivion. He uses larger and more conventional forces than Crumb but does so to equally arresting effect: “Solo for two”, for guitar and cello, left hands only, is one of many instrumental tours de force. Here, then, are two of the most remarkable twentieth-century ensemble works ever written for the guitar, albeit not for the faint-hearted or the tune-loving listener.
John Anthony Lennon pays tribute to gipsy culture and the spontaneity of its music – but in his own rather than its native language. He describes Zingari as “a suite of [five] concert arias rather than a concerto in the classic form”; each has a broadly descriptive title. Here the ‘conventional’ listener will find the most familiar and comforting ground. Only a guitarist of the highest technical skill and musical insight could play and empathize with these works: Starobin is a model of the ilk, teamed with other players of similar calibre. This is a remarkable and magnificently recorded disc, nothing less than a milestone in the progress of the twentieth-century guitar. R1 '9706034'