Naxos Guitar

Winner of several important international competitions, including the 2006 Michele Pittaluga Guitar Competition, Alessandria, Italy, Artyom Dervoed started playing guitar at the age of six. He has since enjoyed a career that has taken him to the United States and many European cities. This recital features works by contemporary composers from the Russian Federation, including Valery Biktashev’s masterpiece Orpheus, based on the Orpheus and Eurydice story, and Sergei Orekhov’s virtuoso The Troika Variations, closely influenced by Russian gypsy music.

Henze recordings don’t come my way very often, but when they do I’m reminded of just how versatile a composer he is. There are also fine DVDs of his best stage works; L’Upupa und der Triumph des Sohnesliebe (Euroarts) is a treat for the eye and ear, and there’s an unmissable Ondine from Covent Garden, with Miyako Yoshida in the name part.

Over the last 20 years, the Naxos label has done a great deal to obtain its reputation as one of the leading classical guitar labels. Its very first guitarist was Gerald Garcia, who was not slow to show the way forward by extending the rather limited guitar repertoire by making arrangements of pieces originally written for other instruments. This is what he has done here, too: None of the music on this disc was written for guitar, it is all arranged by Garcia himself, who plays a modern guitar and definitely not a baroque instrument.

Listening to a work of Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness, you recognize his characteristic style in a few measures. His music is often broadly expansive, painting sonorous landscapes that often use brass instruments to blend with and accentuate the strings. Also, while his peers experimented with serialism or highly intellectually challenging styles, Hovhaness maintained his world music-infused neo-Romantic style throughout his life. The result is an enormous body of work that are all a joy to listen to.