The excellent new album Intimate Impressions for Two Guitars by the duo Adam Cicchillitti and Steve Cowan consists of music originally written for piano, harp, or two guitars by leading 20th century composers who spent the bulk of their careers working in Paris, such as Ravel, Debussy, Mompou, Tailleferre, and Jolivet. The arrangements, the majority of which are by the Cicchillitti/Cowan duo, eloquently illustrate that the tone colors, intimacy, and pure lyricism of the composers’ styles are ideally suited to the guitar, and that the harmonic language translates beautifully to a guitar duo. Simply captivating!

REVIEW:

New additions to the guitar duo repertoire: 20th Century French works arranged for two guitars, artistically performed by Canadian guitarists who clearly have command of transcription skills, and also a unified delivery of the music in all its technical complexity and musical depth. Drew Henderson and Michael Kolk’s arrangement of the `Prelude’ from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin, the only arrangement in the program not by the duo, is nothing short of stellar in concept and execution. There follows the almost obligatory contemporary work on the program, Serenade by Andre Jolivet. Even though it was written for and premiered by Presti & Lagoya, an inspiring duo from the mid-1900s not known for avante-garde musical excursions, it disrupts the flow in this otherwise delightful program of warm and uplifting music. Liner notes by Richard Turp are well written and interesting, leaving the listener with a fairly complete picture of the music.

-- American Record Guide

Chamber Avenue, another album in Marcin Wadolowski’s discography released under the umbrella of the DUX record label, is a combination of chamber sound with the freedom of jazz improvisation. For Marcin Wadolowski, the album is a tribute to great artists whose lives were strongly associated with music and who gave him so many emotions and the most beautiful sounds. It is also a bow to the classical guitar, whose sound he loves and hears on a daily basis. This album is an original combination of purely classical and strictly jazz inspirations. The album contains both arrangements of known and highly regarded pieces (including by Fryderyk Chopin) and ingenious works dedicated to distinguished guitarists and composers.

It’s easy to identify the classical guitar with Spanish repertoire. After all, Andrés Segovia, who revived the fortunes of the instrument in the early decades of the 20th century after long neglect, was a Spaniard. This does not do justice, however, to the major contribution made to 20th-century guitar repertoire by a number of national schools, among which the United Kingdom’s is particularly outstanding for the quantity and quality of the pieces. This album offers a significant sample of music for solo guitar by four important composers: Cyril Scott, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten and William Walton. Despite being relatively unfamiliar to the wider public, the figure of Cyril Scott (1879–1970) is one of real interest. Though it was written in 1927, Scott’s Sonatina has only entered the repertoire of today’s guitarists in recent years. Its solid compositional mastery gives rise to a beauty at once enigmatic and captivating. Lennox Berkeley’s (1903–1989) compositions for the guitar span almost half a century and are a faithful record of his stylistic evolution. Berkeley’s 4 Pièces pour la guitare is a sparkling collection in spirit very close to the style of composers such as Albert Roussel and Francis Poulenc. The Nocturnal after John Dowland Op.70 (1963) by Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) is also a theme and variations, but rather than present the theme and develop it with variations, Britten inverts the form, revealing the theme only at the very end of the piece after it is gradually unveiled in fragments of a musical mosaic cleverly scattered across the preceding variations. The irreverent japes of William Walton’s (1902–1983) Façade for speaker and instrumental sextet, which in 1922/3 marked the composer’s debut as an enfant terrible, soon gave way to a late-Romantic style closer to Bax and Vaughan Williams.

Around 1800 Vienna was, alongside Paris, one of the European centers for guitar performance. The instrument was well suited for the idiom of Viennese classicism and ideal for domestic music-making and it was promoted by figures such as the virtuoso Mauro Giuliani and the composer/publisher Anton Diabelli. But Beethoven, the towering giant of musical Vienna, seems to have been unmoved by the charms of the guitar – while instead composing for its sibling, the mandolin. Duo Halász, the husband and wife team of Franz and Débora Halász have now rectified this, by appropriating Beethoven’s four extant pieces for mandolin and piano (WoO?43 and 44) as well as adapting some other early compositions, including the Serenade in D major for flute and piano and the Variations on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ for violin and piano. In doing so they follow the example of an eminent guitarist and contemporary of Beethoven, namely Ferdinando Carulli, whose 1825 arrangement of the Variations on Mozart’s ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ closes the programme. Franz and Débora Halász have made a number of recordings for BIS, together and separately, to critical acclaim, including a Latin Grammy Award for their disc Alma Brasileira with chamber works by Radamés Gnattali.

Spanish colonies in Central and South America emerged as wellsprings of cultural activity throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The meeting of indigenous populations with Latin American cathedrals and courtly life resulted in styles bearing the imprint of folk music, even in sacred compositions. The sophisticated musical culture of Guatemala City Cathedral is represented in an archive of hundreds of works, several of which are recorded here. The guitars, harp, voices and percussion of acclaimed ensemble El Mundo bring to life the vibrant and at times hypnotic dance rhythms of Spain, Africa and the New World, creating a sound unique to this region, and one that still flourishes to this day.

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An enchanting album of Baroque music from the Spanish colonies

These humble musicians created songs and dances unique to their region of the Americas. Some of the music is naïve and earnest, some surprisingly sophisticated, all of it is pure delight. © 2021 Rafael's Music

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Perfect balance of sacred and profane

This thoughtful collection of compositions from the Cathedral of Guatemala City archives reimagines a wealth of music made in colonial Latin America

The sequence is thoughtfully conceived and presented with a lightness of touch that makes it constantly engaging. Dance rhythms lift even the most serious sacred settings, and El Mundo’s quartet of singers, accompanied by three strings, percussion and a mostly strummed continuo group, balance the sacred and the profane perfectly. © 2021 The Guardian

The iconic guitarist Julian Bream commissioned music from a number of British composers with international reputations, thus creating a whole new repertoire of guitar music. He also played an important role in the revival of interest in the Elizabethan lute, his recitals bringing Early Music to a new audience. John Dowland’s beautiful Pavanis followed by Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland, written for Bream and one of the most significant guitar works of the 20th century. Cyril Scott’s Sonatina, overlooked for decades, is heard here in the premiere recording of Bream’s revised edition. Volume 1 can be heard on 8.557040.

As the innovative, world-renowned guitarist Smaro Gregoriadou says in her notes for this stunning new recording, her fourth for Delos, its music offers “encouragement and hope,” and illuminates with “a different kind of light, a different sort of fire.” The program begins with her beautiful transcription of Bach’s beloved Solo Violin Sonata #2 and offers Britten’s fascinating Nocturnal, along with works by Gubaidulina and Hétu. As Raymond Tuttle put it, in a Fanfare review of one of Smaro’s earlier Delos releases, “Gregoriadou evokes musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, and Wanda Landowska in her willingness to find a new way to express herself and to reanimate the music.”

REVIEW:

What is special about this recording is Gregoriadou’s focus on timbre. Her technique is exceptional, but it is always at the service of creating a sound world with a wide spectrum. Her dynamic shading in the last movement of the Hétu is astonishing, and it is so effortlessly achieved that you don’t think about technique as you listen. I don’t think of Gregoriadou as a guitarist. I think of her as a musician who happens to play the guitar. This is a very beautiful guitar recital, with recorded sound that makes it seem as if you are in the room with Gregoriadou, and at just the right distance for the best perspective.

-- Fanfare

Navona Records presents European/American composer Svjetlana Bukvich’s latest masterpiece: EXTENSION, a multifaceted collection of pieces that use technology, music, and the motions of dance to both deconstruct and reimagine ideas of genre and cultural division. In EXTENSION, listeners traverse ten innovative pieces that are both deeply personal and universal. Bukvich describes herself as aiming for a “no-genre-borderless-flow” with her music and, on a larger scale, in the structures of human society. Indeed, she captures that spirit immensely: hybridizing musical languages from American minimalism, art and progressive rock, and German classicism, to Italian polyphony, Russian romanticism, jazz, and ethnic idioms, she creates a cinematic, ‘fictocritical’ sound that is entirely unique but at once familiar. From the opening whispers of the electric violin in The Beginning to the evocative title track Extension which mingles both voice and synth, the album is a sweeping conversation between the natural and technological, the language of sound and the language of numbers. The piece Once You Are Not a Stranger appears in three iterations: instrumentally, vocally, and as an orchestral reprise. The meditative return of the piece emphasizes the expression of its title — in the acceptance of profound loss and the redemptive possibilities that extend out of it, there is no division, and no one is a stranger. The composer herself knows the world’s need for connection all too well — her past includes an escape from her home in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the midst of the Civil War before finding her way to America where she continued her pursuits in media arts. In her youth Bukvich has lived in Ethiopia and Scotland, experiences which also influenced her sonic ideas. EXTENSION offers an opportunity for reconnection through dismantling, rebuilding, and exploring concepts of time, style, and musical history.

An exact contemporary of Olivier Messiaen (1908-92), Franco Margola was a Brescian musician born and bred, growing up within the culture of the city’s historic industry of string-instrument making. He composed in all the major classical genres but his music has been little heard outside Italy: a situation which this engaging new collection of his chamber music should remedy. Though he composed operas and symphonies, Margola was most at home in the world of miniatures such as we find on this album. He had a ready fund of quirky, memorable melodies which spring from the neoclassical Italian idiom honed by composers of the 1920s and 30s such as Respighi and Casella. While still a student, he met Alfredo Casella, and showed him a recently composed song. Casella was impressed and asked for more, so Margola an instrumental trio which Casella proceeded to perform with his own ensemble throughout Italy and farther. These precociously mature student years are represented on this album by the Piccola Sonata for violin and piano, composed in 1929. There are three sections within its concise five-minute span, largely elegiac in character and flavored not only with late-Romantic harmonies but the unmistakable influence of Maurice Ravel. At the other end of his life, Margola began to write for mandolin as a professor at the conservatoire in Parma. He treats the instrument like a lute, as if transcribing Renaissance dances in the style of Respighi, but the harmonies remain richly Romantic. One particular highlight is the Romanza senza parole, a song without words with an airy theme that alternates between the piano and the mandolin in a lyrical mood that naturally brings Mendelssohn and the world of Lieder to mind. Made in the composer’s home city of Brescia, these recordings are led by the mandolin player Raffaelle lo Ragione, an experienced soloist in music of the Baroque and Romantic eras, with a previous Brilliant Classics album of neglected Neapolitan music to his credit, ‘Serenata Napoletana’.

REVIEW:

There is some wonderful music on this disc, especially the lovely Picccola Suonata, a work clearly wedded to the Romantic Era. Occasionally one can hear a harmonic reference that is a bit adventurous, but those moments are fleeting. This is music of great charm and eloquence, coupled with wonderful melodic invention. It is simple, without being simplistic. All of the performers on the disc serve the music well. Their performances are sympathetic and sincere in their expression. The recorded sound is very good.

– Fanfare

In the early 19th-century, a rivalry existed between two of Italy's greatest guitarists/composers, Francesco Molini and Ferdinando Carulli. This album features not only the complete Molino works for flute and guitar, but also the Carulli Concerto for Flute and Guitar. Both composers are wonderful, as are these performances. Diversity of styles is a hallmark of Roberto Alvarez’s concerts and recitals. As a matter of fact he feels just as comfortable performing classical, baroque or avant-garde music as well as Celtic, jazz or rock. He has received various international prizes, such as the Diploma of Honor in the Torneo Internazionale di Musica, Concurso Internacional de Música “Paper de Musica” de Capellades, the Ángel Muñíz Toca Award and the Ciutat de Manresa Prize. Born and raised in Singapore, Kevin Loh is a recipient of the Fellowship of the Royal Schools of Music, the 2018 Goh Soon Tioe Centenary Award and the 2010 HSBC Youth Excellence Award for Musical Excellence. He was talent-scouted by The Yehudi Menuhin School via his YouTube channel when he was only 12 years old and was awarded a grant by The Rolling Stones to study at the prestigious music school as their first Asian guitarist.