These two composers,
although not exact contemporaries, can be regarded as heirs
to Sor and Giuliani. Both were brilliant guitarists of course;
at this time practically no one wrote guitar music if he wasn’t
a guitarist himself. Today they are not as well-known as their
predecessors or the generation coming after them e.g. Tarrega
... to non-guitarists, that is. To guitarists they are a well-known
quantity and, to quote Colin Cooper’s illuminating booklet
notes: “After the huge wave of guitar popularity in the early
part of the nineteenth century had subsided, the talents of
Regondi and Mertz shine like lighthouses over a dark sea.”
They were also held in high esteem during their lifetime.
Regondi for instance had a composition by Sor dedicated to
him and he performed with musicians of the calibre of pianist
Ignaz Moscheles, singer Maria Malibran and pianist Clara Schumann.
He composed surprisingly little for the guitar. The bulk of
his oeuvre was written for concertina, an instrument he also
played to perfection. The rest of his guitar compositions
are available on Naxos 8.554191.
The Étude No.
4(b) on this disc is thought to be a transcription of
a concertina piece, but hearing it who would think it was
conceived for anything other than the guitar. The two long
variations, or Air Variés, have roughly the same structure:
slow introduction, singable theme and a number of virtuoso
variations.
Ricardo Jesús
Gallén Garcia, as his full name reads, already has an impressive
discography which has been highly acclaimed. Hearing him playing
these admittedly intricate pieces one has to join in the ovations.
His tremolo playing, a technique that Regondi employs frequently,
is exemplary. The Reverie, Op. 19 shows him to the
best advantage. Overall he is very careful with dynamics and
there is an ebb and flow in the playing that keeps the music
constantly alive. There are a number of annoying extraneous
noises – the usual guitarists’ dilemma with fingers grating
against strings – but not to such an extent as to spoil the
listening pleasure. Since I haven’t seen the music I don’t
know if there are any indications about pauses between the
variations in the two Air Variés, but my spontaneous
reaction was that I would have preferred them to follow en
suite instead of chopping up the composition into separate
pieces.
Mertz may be better-known
to present-day listeners, not least because he cultivated
the once so popular method of presenting popular operatic
melodies and other tunes in elaborated medleys or Opern-Revue
- something that virtuoso pianists like Thalberg and Liszt
also practised. Instead of these we get a substantial part
of his large collection Bardenklänge, the rest of which
is to be found on Naxos 8.554556. Living in Vienna, which
was in the nineteenth century a melting-pot for music from
practically all Europe and Mertz and the polonaise became
firm favourites among the Viennese. The seven polonaises included
here are all virtuoso pieces and finely contrasted. I find
Mertz’s harmonic thinking sometimes bolder than Regondi’s,
although neither of them is very adventurous in this regard.
All of this is
very attractive music and played so convincingly that it can
easily stand repeated hearing without seeming bland.
Since Norbert
Kraft and Bonnie Silver are responsible for the technical
side one can take it for granted that this disc, like so many
of its predecessors, goes straight into the top-ten list for
guitar recordings.
Göran Forsling
see also Review
by Zane Turner
Ricardo Gallén (guitar)
