Stefano Grondona La Guitarra Callada, Complete Works For Guitar (2017)

Winner of the 2014 Cecil Aronowitz International Viola Competition, Timothy Ridout, joins together with his pianist duo partner, Ke Ma, to record his debut CD with Champs Hill Records. This disc, which is the result of Timothy’s success at the CAIVC, presents the complete Viola works of Henri Vieuxtemps and includes two sonatas, small virtuoso gems and an Etude. Timothy Ridout says of the disc: “Henri Vieuxtemps was one of the greatest violin virtuosi of the 19th century, and as a boy was compared to Paganini, though his compositions often neglected. I believe this is largely due to the fact that he is thought of as a composer solely for the violin, writing music filled with pyrotechnics. However this isn’t true. Vieuxtemps also loved the viola, and it is in his viola works that his lyrical, operatic style is most apparent.”

Georges Migot (1891–1976) authored a vast oeuvre founded on two principles that in various ways pervade all of his work: a nationalist aesthetic and a link to the past. This emerges and is reinforced in repeated references to the French lutenists of old, as well as troubadours and trouveÌres, folk song and ancient monodic forms, particularly plainchant. Rather than limit himself to copying their external structure, however, Migot sought to extract the spirit, sensitivity, grace and sense of freedom from these historic forms, which he believed better suited the infinite nature of human sensitivity. Despite strong and professed ties to his contemporaries Faureì and Debussy, Migot cannot be placed in any school or branch of 20th-century music.

Eladio Scharrón is Associate Professor of Classical Guitar at the University of Central Florida in Orlando since 1998. He is a graduate from the University of Puerto Rico where he studied guitar with Ernesto Cordero. After obtaining the BA in music, he went to Paris to continue graduate studies in guitar under the direction of Alberto Ponce. In 1981 he obtained the prestigious Diplôme de Concertiste at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. Eladio Scharrón has won numerous awards and competitions, among them the Concurso de Guitarra de la Casa de España in Puerto Rico, the International Guitar Competition of Sable Sur Sarthe in France, and the Reynolds Musical Award. He has also participated as a soloist in prestigious international guitar festivals in France, Belgium, Italy, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Mexico and the United States.

Born in Granada in 1934, Antonio Ruiz-Pipó learnt the guitar in his youth but trained as a pianist in Barcelona, where he was taught by Frank Marshall, doyen of the Spanish piano school made famous by Alicia de Larrocha. Further study in Paris refined Ruiz-Pipó’s compositional technique, and he taught at the École Normale from 1977 until his death in 1997.