Meditations – Works for Guitar

Titles are: ‘Registro’ (Lauro), ‘La Catedral’, ‘Una Limonsa por el Amor de Dios’, ‘Julia Florida’ (Barrios), ‘Wind Color Vector’, ‘Two Little Pieces’ (Yoshimatsu), ‘Etude de ArpÚges’, ‘ModÚrÚ’ (Villa-Lobos), ‘Three Incantations’ (Lovelady), ‘Carprichio ?r
Like his fellow countryman John Williams, Australian-born guitarist Craig Ogden is no slouch when it comes to performing new repertoire. So, for an album of “meditative” music that could have been an excuse simply to dust-off some old classical guitar warhorses, Ogden fearlessly throws in four premiere recordings of contemporary pieces to broaden the disc’s appeal. Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Wind Color Vector uses the guitar to evoke the elemental nature of the wind (it’s one part of a three-movement work inspired by wind, water and sky) with extensive use of harmonics; while his Two Little Pieces are musical depictions of “a lonely fish” (lots of swirling right hand tremelo) and “a white view”(!). Eduardo Sainz de la Maza’s Platero y yo imparts a gentle jazz sensibility to a Spanish subject; while the last of William Lovelady’s Incantations is subtitled “Hommage to Stanley Myers”, which links neatly to Myers’s most famous composition, his Cavatina (here played in John Williams’s classic solo guitar arrangement for the film The Deer Hunter). Throughout, Ogden’s playing is a constant source of pleasure. Whether in evergreens like Cavatina and Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, or the new, unfamiliar repertoire, his flawless technique and tone-production, perfectly captured by the Chandos recording, are the strongest reasons to buy this disc. –Mark Walker