A classic, and big favorite of mine! I first fell in love with this work after hearing a recording the great Cuban guitarist Rey de la Torre (a teacher of one of my teachers!). I’m very happy to have finally been able to record my interpretation, thanks to Pavan Guitars.

A classic! No introduction necessary.

This is a wonderful prelude by María Luisa Anido I became completely enamored with last summer. I took advantage of some available space a local church to do a quick live recording. This is performed on my 1960 Manuel Velásquez guitar with Aquila nylgut strings. Keep an eye out for recordings on real gut strings!

The second of five recordings for Pavan Guitars! Here I’m playing El pregón de las flores by Ángel Barrios, an much underrated composer and guitarist from the early twentieth century. A native of Granada, Spain, he grew very close to the famous composer Manuel de Falla while he lived there from 1920-1939. They shared an admiration for flamenco and coplas, short lyric songs that inspired this composition.

This is a live recording of Miguel Llobet’s famous arrangement of the Catalan Christmas carol, El Noi de la Mare for Pavan Guitars. Tom Prisloe, owner of Pavan Guitars, lent me an amazing cedar-top guitar to try out and demo on the recordings. This is the first of five pieces, so more to come!

Ernesto Halffter wrote Peacock Pie, a very short three-movement work, for Andrés Segovia in 1923. It was premiered at a concert Segovia held at the Teatro de Comedia in Madrid the same year alongside the premieres of Torroba's Sonatina and Turina's Sevillana. The work betrays the influence of Manuel de Falla (Halffter's composition teacher) and Stravinsky in its sardonic neoclassical style. It is a rare example of such a work and, unfortunately, all but the first movement has been lost. Recreations have been possible based on the composer's own arrangement of Peacock Pie and four-hand piano.

Salvador Bacarisse was a prolific Spanish composer who, with the notable exception of some guitar music he wrote for Narciso Yepes, has been largely under-performed in recent decades. This work is his earliest composition for guitar and has only recently be rediscovered and published. It was originally the third movement of his piano piece, Heraldos (1923). It was arranged for guitar by the composer by the guitarist, Regino Sainz de la Maza, around 1930.

It is a beautiful and lyrical work that betrays the influence of Ravel and, in particular, Debussy in the work’s concise form with no development, harmonic planing, and extended non-functional harmonies. It also evokes an air of the fanciful past—much like Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante defunte—and betrays some vague similarities to early music for plucked strings in the stately meter of the pavane genre.

A (sort of) new piece written by Mark Delpriora. Written a long time ago, recently revised and published! I’m very proud to have made the first recording of this lovely short work.

A favorite work of mine from my former teacher, Mark Delpriora! This piece is inspired by an e.e. cummings poem of the same name. Each movement depicts a different line from the last stanza of the poem. The third and final movement contains a fragment depicting the last line of the stanza, "a bird flies into a mirror." The whole poem can be found below, with the last stanza contained in parentheses (as in the original).

in the middle of a room - e.e. cummings

in a middle of a room
stands a suicide
sniffing a Paper rose
smiling to a self

"somewhere it is Spring and sometimes
people are in real:imagine
somewhere real flowers,but
I can't imagine real flowers for if I

could,they would somehow
not Be real"
(so he smiles
smiling)"but I will not

everywhere be real to
you in a moment"
The is blond
with small hands

"& everything is easier
than I had guessed everything would
be;even remembering the way who
looked at whom first,anyhow dancing"

(a moon swims out of a cloud
a clock strikes midnight
a finger pulls a trigger
a bird flies into a mirror)

Great short piece by Eastman composer, David Liptak. It is based on a song called Freight Train by the blues singer and guitarist, Elizabeth Cotton. 

The piece was recorded live at the Tenri Cultural Institute in Manhattan for a concert curated by the American Composers Alliance. 

The Fredonia Guitar Quartet performing Roland Dyen's Filmaginaires.

This work was written especially for the Fredonia Guitar Quartet after a concert where the Quartet played the composers own compositions for him.  

 The Quartet was Anthony LaLena, Michael Mendoza, Mario Rubano and Jahzeel Montes.

This is an underplayed but wonderful piece by the Cuban composer Joaquin Nin-Culmell. It was published in 1955 and written for the Cuban guitarist Rey de La Torre.

Nin-Culmell is most known as a professor of music at the University of Berkeley in California. His father, Joaquin Nin, was a successful composer and arranger of Spanish folk music. The most famous member of his family however was his sister, Anaïs Nin. She is known for her literary works and erotic novels. 

Rey de la Torre was a prominent performer and pedagogue of the 20th century. He is, perhaps, most famous for being the last pupil of the Catalan virtuouso, Miguel Llobet. In addition to Nin-Culmell's piece, Julian Orbon's Preludio y Danza was also written for Rey. He premiered other lesser know 20th century masterpieces like Carlos Chavez's 3 Pieces for Guitar and José Ardévol's Sonata (both work have since been recorded by Manuel Barrueco). He also was the first guitarist to perform Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez in the United States with the Cleveland Symphony. 

Maurice Ohana's Tiento was written for Narciso Yepes in 1957.

When I had the privilege of playing this piece for the great Uruguayan guitarist, Eduardo Fernandez, he had referred to the work as the "Guernica of music". It is very compelling to think of this work as Picasso's Guernica because, similarly to Picasso, Ohana uses many typically Spanish musical elements in a distorted manner. Ohana evokes the cante jondo (deep song) style of traditional flamenco music in similar ways that Picasso visually treats typical Spanish elements in his painting. The musical tropes associated with flamenco, the rasqueados in particular, are portrayed in a tormented and abstracted way. Additionally, Ohana makes musical allusions to gregorian chant and chorale music, both of which can be understood as a reference to Spain's traditional Catholic culture and wealth of ancient religious choral music. The form and thematic content of the work itself is even ancient; a continuous set of variations reminds classical guitarists and music historians of the earliest variation forms written for the Spanish vihuelists, and Las Folias de España, the theme Ohana uses, is a traditional theme very commonly used in the Renaissance. 

In light of these musical allusions and particular contextual associations, listeners are presented with a terrifyingly perverted representation of a Spain beaten down by the horrors of civil war and other atrocities of the 20th century, much like Picasso's Guernica.