Luca Scarlini - Complete Music for Guitar - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Thanya Iyer - Tide/tied [COMPACT DISCS] Digipack Packaging date 05/09/2025

Born in 1949, Fabio Vacchi stands among the pre-eminent Italian composers of his generation. Working primarily in the operatic field, he has had pieces staged at the Teatro alla Scala and by the Opéra Comique in Paris, the Opera de Lyon, the Maggio Musicale in Florence and the Teato Comunale in his home city of Bologna. Vacchi's instrumental pieces have attracted similar high-profile performances. His chamber cycle Luoghi Immaginari (1987-1992), has been given across the world, including at the Salzburg Mozarteum conducted by Daniel Harding. Other pieces were commissioned by Claudio Abbado and by the Tokyo Quartet. The most substantial piece on this new collection of his chamber pieces was commissioned by the Swedish guitarist Magnus Andersson and first performed by him in 1997 as a guitar concerto; this Quintetto Notturno Concertante dates from 2012 and is a masterful condensation of the complexities of the original, rich instrumental texture, while preserving it's fleeing moods and subtly shifting changes of harmony. At the other end of this collection, Livia Rado sings Flow my Dowland, a rapturous transformation of five songs by the Elizabethan lutenist, in which the original vocal part is richly embroidered by Vacchi's own modern reimagination of the accompanying part, scored for a small ensemble of winds, strings, vibraphone and harp, to melting and magical effect. In between come a pair of solo works, though in fact Plynn quotes Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland as a study of harmonics on the guitar, evoking it's most dreamlike and insubstantial timbres. The earliest piece here is a Suite for flute and guitar, dating from 1971. Here, the 22-year-old Vacchi is at his most experimental in terms of both form and harmony, employing extraneous elements such as pen and paper and sending both instruments to the extremes of their register, though always with an int

As a teacher of piano, theory and composition at the conservatoire in Valencia, Vicente Asencio (1908-1979) played an instrumental part in the success of Narciso Yepes and countless other influential Spanish musicians in the middle of the 20th century. His role as a teacher has unfairly overshadowed his own creative output, which now justly takes the spotlight in the talented hands of the Italian guitarist Alberto Mesirca. Asencio's output for guitar has previously been investigated on record, including by the young Elise Neumann on Brilliant Classics (BC9287) but this is the first-ever album dedicated to his guitar music. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his established reputation as a teacher, it reveals a composer of considerable craft and fluency, entirely at home in his adopted medium. Valencian born and bred, Asencio composed a Suite of Homages that became a calling-card for Yepes and other Spanish guitarists looking to play music of their own era that had something distinctive to say about modern Spain to an international audience. In turn, the homages pay tribute to Scarlatti, de Falla and Lorca, and between them they sum up the ingredients of Asencio's style the ruminative grace of the Sonatina, the evocative melancholy of the Elegia, and the fiery sensuality of the Tango. Dating from 1965, Collectici íntim was a second commission from Yepes, a character suite of portraits in the manner of the personalities so wittily drawn by Couperin in his keyboard pieces. Suite mistica derives from a piece commissioned by Spanish radio to mark Holy Week in 1971. Andres Segovia was taken with the work, Dipso ('I thirst' - one of the Seven Last Words) that he asked Asencio for two companion pieces, which were written on the subject of the Agony in the Garden and then the rushing wind of Pentecost. Finally, from 1971, there is Asencio's masterpiece for the guitar, the Suite Va