Andrés Segovia is one of those names everyone knows, but with the arrival of new superstar guitarists on the scene, not one of which would have had a career without Segovia's influence, his music-making is not so much heard anymore. The newcomer to his music, especially, is faced with a confusing series of overlapping reissues when searching through online catalogs. From England's pop-oriented Cherry Red label comes a solution to the problem -- a single-disc overview of Segovia's career, consisting of short pieces recorded between 1927 and 1956. The label's origins in the pop world show up only in the remastering, which gives a bit too much of a massage to the original materials in an effort to get them to sound the same. The program itself is ideal, giving a good illustration of Segovia's single-handed creation of a guitar repertory out of the isolated scraps of one that he began with. There are works by contemporary Spanish and especially Latin American composers, commissioned by Segovia in an effort to enlarge the body of music available for the instruments. He was uncannily sympathetic to some of these works in performance, and a sense of his direct communication with the composer's intentions persists in the 1955 recording of the moody Villa-Lobos Etude No. 8 in C sharp minor, from the 12 Etudes (track 6). There are Segovia's forays into the Renaissance and Baroque guitar and lute repertories -- much more systematically explored today, but one is struck when listening to works like the little Allemande of Sylvius Leopold Weiss (track 10) by how few of Segovia's contemporaries played Baroque music with the abandon he brought to it -- the Baroque works have the excitement they deserve. Finally there are transcriptions of existing works for other instruments, often done with the intent of showcasing Segovia's own technical mastery. Through it all there's the amazing clarity and brightness of Segovia's tone, a commanding quality that gets the listener's attention from the first bar of music. Recommended for anyone who has heard the name Segovia and wondered what all the fuss was about.
© TiVo