Heck Devine

This recital offers a kaleidoscopic array of styles unified by South America’s national instrument, the guitar. Titans of Latin American music such as Piazzolla and Barrios Mangoré are represented, but so too are distinctive composers less well known outside of their own countries. Genres such as milonga, Venezuelan waltz and choro are featured, in music suffused with lyric melancholy and vivacious, biting rhythms. ‘His musicianship is unimpeachable, his fleet technique is world-class’ wrote American Record Guide of Graham Anthony Devine (8.554195).

Though better known as a virtuoso keyboard player, as a young man Handel also trained as a violinist. His works for violin and harpsichord, says essayist Donald Burrows, ‘do not attract attention by flashy virtuosity: rather, they are flowing and agreeable chamber music, in which the violinist is in musical conversation with the keyboard player’.

The decades around 1600 bore witness to the flourishing of a remarkable musical tradition: the art of diminution, in which simple melodies were given exquisitely virtuosic embellishments, effectively creating new works…

The guitar has played a major part in the evolution of Brazilian music, especially during the twentieth century. On this recording the charm, beauty and sensuality of Brazilian guitar music can be heard in pieces as diverse as Marco Pereira’s Pixaim, a fast rhythmic dance originating from North-East Brazil, João Pernambuco’s cheeky Blackbird, the classic song Girl from Ipanema by Antonio Carlos Jobim, a founder of the Bossa Nova movement and, from Brazil’s most famous composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, the hauntingly lyrical Sentimental Melody, written for the film Green Mansions in 1957.