Celebration for Segovia - Guitar
Solos by Michael Lorimer You can purchase
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"CELEBRATION
FOR SEGOVIA is music of memories - memories for the composers,
for me, and I hope, for you. In it I pay homage to our century's
greatest guitarist, Andrés
Segovia.
When Segovia was a boy he wished to study with one guitarist who died before Segovia could meet him. Side One begins and ends with music of that artist, Francisco Tárrega. Capricho Arabe is Tárrega's masterpiece and is one innocent, lyric piece I loved to hear Segovia play when I was a boy. MEMORIES (Recuerdos de la Alhambra), Tárrega's most famous solo, will always recall for me one evening when the gold and orange rays of the Mediterranean sunset illumined Maestro Segovia's study as he showed me his fingerings for this evocative music.
Tárrega's music frames two pieces from Spain's southern province of Andalusia, Segovia's homeland. FANTASIA SEVILLIANA is one brilliant showpiece written for Segovia in the 1920s by Joaquin Turina. Here Turina composed a fantasy on sevillianas, a jubilant dance from Seville. Albéniz's ZAMBRA GRANADINA portrays a gypsy party, the zambra, as you could have heard it in the 1890s in the caves of Granada. As the music begins, you can imagine the rhythmic hand-clapping of gypsies who sit in straight-backed chairs against the white walls of a cave and surround an open area of red brick floor in which, to the plaintive wail of gypsy song, urged on by the strains of a guitarist and onlookers' cries, individual dancers appear: now one springs in gay exuberance, now one writhes in passionate trance.
Andrés
Segovia, who put guitar on the twentieth-century concert stage with
his performances of music written for him, and pieces he arranged,
also appears in this CD in one guise too little known, that of
Segovia the composer. Here is a triptych of pieces written and
published separately, brought together in the order in which he liked
them to be heard. Segovia wrote the first of three in the early 1950s
when he recuperated from an eye operation and lay for several weeks
in one position with his eyes bandaged. He remembered the severe pain
he felt in his fingertips when he began playing the guitar after
events once before prevented his practicing and this time, to keep
his left-hand calluses, he found a way to continue playing. He wrote
STUDY WITHOUT LIGHT and dedicated it to his friend José Rubio
who stayed at his bedside day and night. PRAYER is in memory of
Segovia's favorite of the many composers he has inspired and guided,
Manuel Ponce. In the last bars of Segovia's homage, a theme from
Ponce's third guitar sonata appears, ghostly and wistful. REMEMBRANCE
is romantic and recalls harmonies of the nineteenth-century composer
Robert Schumann.
The remaining music on the CD features one composer whose music I have loved since infancy - Johann Sebastian Bach.. When I was ten years old, I heard guitar music for the first time, a record of Segovia playing Bach, immediately took a cheap Mexican guitar my father had recently purchased, and started to teach myself how to play. Many years later, I arranged the SUITE IN D MAJOR, the first of Bach's six exquisite solo violoncello suites. Here also is HOMAGE TO BACH by one of my favorite twentieth-century composers of guitar music, Segovia's friend, the great Brazilian musician Heitor Villa-Lobos."
You can listen to Michael's music right now!
Click on any of the songs to the right to hear a RealAudio stream of each piece. It's low-fidelity, but will give you a good idea of what the music sounds like. For high-fidelity MP3 versions of these songs and CD copies, please visit our MP3 distribution center! |
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If you would like to learn more about Andrés Segovia,
please read this special article
written by Michael titled "Andrés
Segovia - The Teacher"