Guitare : Colores del Sur : danses baroques pour guitare

   in Early Music Today (Dec, 2014)
This CD booklet argues passionately that the musicologist’s 19th-century Urtext pedantry cuts off baroque music from its wellspring in popular music – fair comment in the case of the baroque guitar – and more radically, that we must ‘confidently use the technical resources of our own instruments … to overcome the leap which divides the historical reconstruction from the living music’. At which the purist will give a deep sigh, fearing just one more Gaspar-Sanz-with-bongos CD.

Indeed, the players have included about the most avant-garde pieces in the historical plucked repertoire: Santiago de Murcia’s ‘Cumbees’ (the first piece in guitar history to call for drumming on the soundboard), Kapsberger’s ‘Arpeggiata’, ‘Capona’ …