The Guitar Manuscripts

The idea underlying this Da Vinci Classics album is to gather together a collection of pieces which have been significant in the performing artist’s life. These include pieces which have been dedicated to him, pieces he premiered, or pieces he found – as we will see in the forthcoming pages. In Colone’s own words, they represent “a corpus of works which are close to me”.

John W. Duarte was born in Sheffield, England on 2 October 1919. His father was a Scottish soldier, who died in 1919, and he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents. He started playing the ukulele, but soon moved to the guitar at the age of 15.

Alexandre Tansman’s guitar music was almost exclusively created as the result of his friendship with the legendary Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia. The true extent of this catalogue has only recently become apparent, with unknown works emerging from archive sources. Performed after careful research into the original manuscripts, Andrea De Vitis’s programme brings together pieces that reference Tansman’s favourite musicians from history, in particular Bach and Chopin—masterfully intertwining personal affections with sophisticated techniques to create some of the most important guitar repertoire of the 20th century.

The rediscovery of the works by Ferdinand Rebay (Vienna, June 11th, 1880 – November 6th, 1953) is due mainly to an article by Johann Gaitzsch published in 2006 on the journal Soundboard. It immediately elicited deep interest in the international community of guitarists.

Luigi Attademo is an Italian classical guitarist .He worked in the archive of the Fundación Andrés Segovia (in Linares, Jaén, Spain), where he discovered some unknown manuscripts of important composers, such as Jaume Pahissa, Alexandre Tansman, Gaspar Cassadò and others.

It was a pivotal meeting in the mid-1920s that marked the beginning of an enduring musical and personal friendship between Alexandre Tansman and the Spanish virtuoso guitarist Andres Segovia. Tansman’s legacy for the instrument ranges over a 57-year period, inaugurated by a dazzling Mazurka and represents Segovia’s ‘most advanced commitment to modern music.’ This first volume presents suites and dances inspired by Italy, Poland and Eastern Europe, and includes Suite in modo polonico, heard here in its original version, not the Segovia-authorized collage. Andrea De Vitis has meticulously researched the original manuscripts to resolve any doubts and omissions in published editions.

Bleckell Murry Neet is an album of Cumbrian music played on the guitar and harp. Ed Heslam has a background in classical guitar playing, as a soloist and in various ensembles, while Jean Altshuler has built a career as an orchestral harpist and, more recently, playing the lever harp in chamber music.

Tenor Jonatan Alvarado and vihuelist Ariel Abramovich browse through the folios of the Huehuetenango song manuscript: 15 volumes of polyphony and Gregorian chants from Northern Guatemala.