Duarte: Guitar Music

August 2001

“John Duarte, now in his eighties, has found a rich vein to explore over the years with the guitar miniature. From his background as a player comes the unfailingly idiomatic character of the music - it sounds as though it's extremely grateful to perform - and from his experience of jazz comes the freely varied melodic lines and the chromatic chords that mildly spice a fairly conventional idiom. Of the eight works here, six are small-scale three-movement suites, with very few movements lasting longer than three minutes. "Some of the best music has been recorded before; the Greek-inspired Musikones, for instance, with its neat alternation of song and dance and interesting use of pentatonic and other modal formations, or the Variations on a Catalan Folksong, an effective showpiece written for John Williams, which accompanies the theme with a figure derived from Bach's Fourth Cello Suite and introduces a different tonality for each of the variations. "The waltzes in homage to Antonio Lauro are written in a straightforward, old-fashioned romantic style, whilst some of the other music is more neo-classical, especially the Sonatinette with its harmony based on fourths. Taken as a whole, the disc is more like easy listening than a vital, compelling musical experience, but there's no doubting the commitment or artistry of Antigoni Goni's performances. Her full, rich tone is well reproduced, too.”