Amor Fati: 20th Century Italian Guitar Music – Andrea Ferrario

The programme on this CD focuses on twentieth-century Italian music for the guitar. Its wide-ranging panorama encompasses works which, while maintaining tonality and forms of the past, mainly exalt the evocative power and a kind of enchanting magic of the six-stringed instrument. It is therefore a mythological guitar, which, by its character, tends to develop its idiomatical values and its sounds as if the instrument should turn itself into a dramatis persona, animated by a series of characters and tales. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an eloquent and extremely cultivated master of this kind of poetics. Spellbound by the fascination of the guitar in 1932, he was enrolled by Andrés Segovia in the army of composers who were his allies; for his Spanish friend (and for other guitarists) he wrote pages imbued with affections, encompassing the festive gaiety and the biting irony, the joking fun and the funereal elegy. In particular, this recording aims at highlighting the last period of the composer’s activity, in which he made use of the guitar with the purpose of looking into himself with a benevolently bitter gaze (resuming his experience as an exile, and looking from above thanks to his penetrating knowledge of humankind); or else in order to stimulate the taste for an expressive and coloured interpretation in his guitar students.