Accidental Guitarist

I had an accident recently that has made it (temporarily?) difficult to play piano.  It is, though, possible to do something I haven't done in more than thirty years, play guitar.  I studied classical guitar for four year, in high school and college,  dropping it when I needed the time for piano, my first love.   Looking into recent developments in technique, I've got to say I'm quite convinced that a lot of it is a vast improvement to the  Tarrega-Segovia dictatorship I was trained in.  I'm especially impressed with the far less dictatorial and insightful studies of Abel Carlevaro, as well as his compositions.

But even more  impressive is the recent practice of playing music of the early 19th century on guitars from the period or on guitars made in the quite different style of guitar used then.     Many of the same pieces I studied more than forty years ago, which sounded somewhat trivial on a modern guitar sound far more convincing on the instruments they were written for, played according to the states intentions of the composers.  Fernando Sor was very specific about how his music was to be played and it's quite different from what later teachers and editors indicated.

One composer I was not familiar with who was quite good and quite interesting is Johann Kaspar Mertz (1806-1856), a Hungarian whose enormous number of fantasias on operas of the day are quite a few steps above most of those by better known composers for more mainstream instruments.   Here is his magnificent take-off of Verdi's Sicilian Vespers which Jerry Williard plays  brilliantly on a guitar by the fine French builder Francois Lacote.