Magdalena Duhagón comments: “I think of the manuscripts of composers of whose works we have recordings in which they play their own works, and their versions are quite different from the editions we know: Barrios, Villa-Lobos, Dilermando Reis. Besides some technical problems in the recordings, sometimes the works are so different in their hands, that some rhythms are completely different from the score, and sometimes entire passages. In these cases I follow the recordings. I’

These days there seems to be a positive Urtext mania among guitarists. I am as fanatic as anybody about respecting the composer’s ideas, but I am referring to something else. Sorry if I somehow contributed to this trend (although I was not the only one) through insisting (20 years ago) that the 1929 version of the Villa-Lobos Études was worth considering (the new edition by Frédéric Zigante in Max Eschig has solved practically all the textual problems and the typos of the 19

Back around the 1970’s a trend started affirming that the classical literature for guitar (I mean Sor, Giuliani and several others, just in case you ignorants don’t know what I am talking about) was passé, because 1) it was not up to the standards of Beethoven or Mozart (they had no idea who Haydn was), 2) it did not modulate enough, 3) it was formally weak, 4) it all sounded the same. In fact, an article on a guitar magazine at the time dared to call Sor “Fernando Bore”. I a

(text written as an obit for the German magazine "Gitarre und Laute") Photo by Alfonso de Béjar 1. Carlevaro is playing his “Preludios Americanos” on TV. I am about ten years old, and I have never seen anything remotely like this, although my father has taken me to several guitar concerts, including Segovia. I just cannot believe what I see and hear. There is no sense of effort whatsoever – the music just flows. Not only there are no indications that the player is concerne

When we listen, we do not feel an isolated sound event as musical. I mean, maybe because I am a guitarist and we cannot produce loooong sounds, an event of relatively short duration. Obviously, a single sound that lasts ten minutes or ten seconds, and changes of colour and intensity may very well be felt as musical – in this sense, the wind is music, or the rain, or the sea. An infinite number of poets had felt and said this since the world exists. The problem is that neithe