I have a soft spot for the recordings made by the Romeros family on Philips Classics in the early 80s. Great music, great performances, great SQ.
This, for example:
And this:
Mark
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I bought a Lagoya box set a while back. It includes all of the duet material.
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Left field? Here’s Gwenifer Raymond live.
She has a new album out in September: Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark
‘Jack Parsons Blues’ track now on Bandcamp.
https://gweniferraymond.bandcamp.com/album/last-night-i-heard-the-dog-star-bark
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The ghost of John Fahey, I saw her a few years ago at Kings Place in London, low on stage craft but big on talent, it was a lovely evening, looking forward to the new album.
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Yes, John Fahey a big influence on her. Her day job is a game designer/ astro-physicist, so she doesn’t have a performing arts background from a music conservatoire. I’ve never seen her live yet.
A lot of the pieces “classical” guitarists play are transcriptions of music written for other instruments. I rather like to hear works explicitly written for guitar. A lot of these are influenced by Spanish models including some of the most popular pieces but there are other influences.
One of these is lute music and songs by the likes of John Dowland. Composer Benjamin Britten wrote his Nocturnal after John Dowland for Julian Bream, who also played a lot of lute music. It’s worth seeking out for a different sound world.
Another influence is jazz guitar and that is at the root of my favourite guitar concerto: the one by Malcolm Arnold also written for Bream. The slow movement in particular is a homage to legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, admired by both Arnold and Bream. To me it conjures up a smoky dive with a sultry jazz band playing and things going on in dark corners just out of sight. I don’t know of anything else quite like it. There are several recordings including one with Bream conducted by the composer:
Roger
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thanks roger
i don’t know the arnold piece at all - so will be trying the recording you recommend
nigel
Guitar concertos and jazz brings to mind Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, a great work, whose slow movement has attracted a number of jazz artists, most notably Miles Davis and Gil Evans on “Sketches of Spain.” I also have jazz versions of the movement by the Modern Jazz Quartet and Chick Corea.