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55K views 248 replies 47 participants last post by  malc 
#1 ·
I have been a classical guitarist for awhile now and am curious what everyone's favourite pieces/composers are as well as the guitar played.
I prefer Sor,Rodrigo,Albeniz,Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Villa-Lobos for composers.

I currently own and play a Cordoba Dolce.



I only wish i had more time to play and practice!!! Drats!

Jim
 
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#113 ·
^ My immediate reaction is I don't find it too appealing. Parts are a bit too seemingly random/pointillistic for my taste, but it has some interesting sonorities. I'd have to listen to it some more to get more out of it.
 
#117 ·
Thanks for the recommandation. There's the Drogoz piece (I think, maybe it's an other one) on YouTube. It's for prepared guitar and it's amazing.
Rafael Andia. He teachs at the Ecole Normale Alfred Cortot. If I could afford living in Paris and studying in a private (not that expensive given how famous and of good repute it is) school, I'd definitely try to study with him.
 
#119 · (Edited)
Pablo Marquez seems to be a great guitarist. Looks like he does a lot of contemporary music, but also south american music (contemporary as well as nationalistic composers such as Gnatalli) with the ensemble of which he's one of the main member, AlmaViva, and renaissance music. He also recorded a CD of spanish music with the famous french cellist Anne Gastinel (as well as Piazzolla's Histoire du Tango with Cécile Daroux). I've heard from my teacher (who have a ex-student who studied with him) that he's one of those musicians who can sight-read awesomely well a lot of music. He's also known as a very serious and interesting teacher.

To put it in a nutshell : great musician and I'm glad those kind of guitarists actually exist (another one could be David Starobin anf of course many others). I hope I'll be able to study with him one day :) (Erm, even just thinking it is possible is wishful thinking.)
 
#121 ·
Here's another very interesting piece for solo guitar by a Japanese composer, Serenade by Toshio Hosokawa :



I'm listening to it for the first time, so I don't really have an opinion yet, but I'm already attracted by it anyway. Some aspects of it remind me Takemitsu's writing for guitar.
There seem to be a lot of great music written for guitar in Japan nowadays (and I guess everywhere else. XIXth century is so cool)
 
#124 · (Edited)
Do you know the whole San Francisco guitar scene ? :)

I've never been able to understand Mano a Mano. I like it, but I'm under the impression that there's a complexe structure involved and that I'm missing it. I wonder how hard it really is. It doesn't seem that hard (ie. not harder than most of the contemporary repertoire for guitar).

Thanks for the video btw. For some reason I was unable to find it on YT - I thought it was deleted.
 
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#125 ·
Yes, pretty much! :)

It's hard, no doubt about it, but it's basically guitaristic if one fingers it carefully. It's comparable to Maw's Music of Memory in difficulty--maybe a little less. The fugue at the climax of MoM is insanely hard!
 
#126 ·
^ I liked both pieces recently posted. The first (Hosokawa piece) does seem to owe a lot to Takemitsu. Mano a Mano (like seemingly soooo much of contemporary guitar repertoire) seems to owe a LOT to Leo Brouwer.

I liked the string bending in the Hosokawa piece. Aside from Roland Dyens he is the only other classical composer I've come across yet to incorporate the technique.
 
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#127 · (Edited)
Mano a Mano is vastly more complex than any Brouwer piece that I've heard. It does make full and very creative use of the guitar's resources, so it shares that element with Brouwer. It's amazing that a non-guitarist could come up with such a piece. I feel the same way about Maw's Music of Memory.
 
#129 · (Edited)
20 years ago imho Pepe Romero was the best guitarist on this planet. The crucial test was (and still is in a way) Tarrega´s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, one of the best pieces of music ever written. Romero played it so lightly, so seemingly effortlessly, like nobody else I ever heard before.

(the young Romero was even better)

Then Jorge Caballero came along and played it with the same style as Romero, as there was no limitation to his technical skills.

And I´ve heard Romero playing BWV 1004 (partita for violin, transcribed for the guitar), another piece, which differentiates between the good and the best, especially the famous Chaconne.
.


Today, Jorge Caballero clearly is the best guitarist out there, just listen to his interpretation of Mussorgky´s Pictures of an Exhibition (there is a youtube-link in this thread). And I reflected the injustice of life for quite some time, when I saw Jorge Caballero standing there in one of the archways of a church in our city (at a break of a performance in this church, we have one the major guitar festivals here), a more or less lonely figure, the one person playing the guitar best out of 8 billion people, shivering in the fresh air, and compared it to the hype, the fastest runner of the world created at the olympics. I´d say, the best guitarist is a hundred times more important than the fastest runner....
 
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#143 ·
What about Jorge Caballero playing Evocacion and El Puerto?



or El Albaicin?



By the way, he followed those Albeniz pieces with his transcription of Alban Berg's Piano Sonata and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition! :eek:
 
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#147 · (Edited)
I'm under the impression he's a guitarist for guitarists... yes I know he won a prestigious multi-instruments competition and so on, but I never hear about a project for new repertoire (like James Boyd's), an ambitious CD release, a chamber ensemble or whatever. This isn't a cricticism of course, I know he's an amazing musician (but I have hard times really liking his tone), but I'm under the impression he mainly plays quasi-impossible virtuosic transcriptions. Am I wrong ?

edit : I see he plays with a violinist.. Ok, he at least does chamber music !


1) He teaches at The Kean University Conservatory of Music in New Jersey.
2) His tone is beautiful in person--never judge tone by a YT video!
3) True, he doesn't release a lot of CDs (he's probably too busy transcribing impossible keyboard pieces!), but he plays a lot of contemporary music: Elliot Carter's Changes, Fernyhough's Kurtze Schatten II, Berio's Sequenza XI--I guess he just doesn't have any videos of them.
4) He actually plays a lot of chamber music with the Miro String Quartet, among others.
 
#148 ·
Ok, thanks for your reply !
He's definitely a very interesting guitarist.

About the tone, I agree I shouldn't have judged on YT, but in every videos I've seen of him (in different locations, with different recording methods I guess) there's this tone which doesn't bother me but doesn't please me neither, so I ended up thinking mr.Caballero had made some aesthetical choices I didn't like - nothing wrong with that. I hope I'll be able to see him live some day :)
 
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