Tárrega: Lagrima

‘The music on this CD reflects my character. It tells the listener who I am.’ Miloš Karadaglić

Charismatic guitarist Miloš Karadaglić debuts on Deutsche Grammophon with an album saluting his instrument’s Mediterranean heritage. Born in the Balkan state of Montenegro, Miloš’s love-affair with the guitar began when he was eight, when his father played him a recording of Segovia making magic with Albeniz’s ‘Asturias’. Miloš gave his first public performance at nine, entered (and won) his first national competition at eleven. He became a star performer on television and radio, took guitar master-classes in Belgrade, and then, shortly after the end of the Balkan war, decided to try for a scholarship at London’s Royal Academy of Muisic.

Miloš’s choices of solo repertoire as well as music for guitar and orchestra are guaranteed to appeal to all lovers of guitar, classical and non-classical alike.

“He punched through this trio of ballads (El Decamerón Negro) with an innate poise and elegance that made you sit up and listen . . . And then the firecracker: A superbly inflected, impeccably judged rendition of Ginastera’s Sonata − a giant tapestry of sound combining luminous melancholy and bravura energy” (The Times)

Bonus DVD

The DVD features a 30min documentary with footage filmed in Montenegro and London. The film brings Miloš’s inspirational story to light, an evocative and beautifully photographed piece that explores his background and how he came to be who he is today. It will showcase Miloš’s talent, his style of play and unique approach to classical guitar and his desire to redefine it as a contemporary instrument. Miloš wants to make classical guitar matter; he wants us to fall in love with its beauty and raw passion and bring new audiences to its repertoire.

The film will not just focus on Miloš the guitarist, but also the person behind the guitar. This will build a bridge between the human story and music, giving the viewer an opportunity to get to know a young man from Montenegro and how each stage of his life has contributed to bringing him to this point.

Guitarist Mattias Jacobsson makes his recording debut on Avie with Invocación, a unique perspective on the works of Francisco Tárrega, his inspiration Chopin, and his students Llobet and Pujol.

The brilliant young guitarist Mattias Jacobsson invokes a guitar tradition originating with the influential Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega. The repertoire explores Tárrega’s influences and legacy, from the inspiration that Chopin had on his musical output through to his students Miguel Llobet and Emilio Pujol. Tárrega often turned to Chopin’s favoured forms - Preludes, Mazurkas and Nocturnes - and also transcribed works in those forms by Chopin. Mattias has created a unique concept in the guitar discography by juxtaposing Chopin transcriptions with Tárrega’s most Chopinesque works. The “invocación” continues through works of two of Tárrega’s most prominent pupils in Barcelona and even extends to Mattias himself, whose first teacher Erik Möllerström studied in Barcelona and secured an instrument from the great guitar maker Ignacio Fleta e hijos, that now has been passed on to Mattias and is played on this recording.

Juilliard-trained Mattias Jacobsson was born in Stockholm and has studied with Göran Söllscher and Sharon Isbin, among others. He has performed throughout Europe and the United States, and has appeared on Spanish television, New York’s WQXR and National Public Radio’s Performance Today. He has further extended his reach with several features in Classical Guitar Magazine and hundreds of thousands of views on his YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/guitarcactus

Widely acclaimed for the subtle artistry of his playing, Pablo Garibay has won numerous international competitions including the ‘JoAnn Falletta’ (USA), ‘Julián Arcas’ (Spain), Manuel M. Ponce (Mexico), René Bartoli (France) and Gevelsverg (Germany). Scarlatti’s ‘soul-searching’ Sonata in D minor, K.213 reveals even more of its expressive poignancy when arranged for guitar, and other sublime works in this recital are closely associated with the great Andrés Segovia, who described Tarréga’s Capricho árabe as ‘especially suited to reach the chords of a feminine heart.’

There is no question of José Miguel Moreno being anything other than the leading Spanish specialist in historical plucked string instruments. As a concert performer, researcher, builder and collector of instruments and co-founder of the Glossa label, Moreno has, over the last 30 years, been the guiding beacon for a number of succeeding generations of guitarists and lutenists the world over. Glossa was the label for which he recorded two of his now legendary programmes, La Guitarra Española (1536-1836) and La Guitarra Española (1818-1918). These had previously been deleted but Glossa are now bringing them back as a double set.

Moreno plays a range of instruments made either by Lourdes Uncilla or by himself in order to infuse with a new vitality the fundamental repertories in the history of the guitar as bequeathed by the vihuelists Narváez, Milán and Mudarra, then later composed by figures such as Francisco Guerau, Santiago de Murcia and Gaspar Sanz, and subsequently through the romantic scores of Fernando Sor and Johann Kaspar Mertz. Tárrega and Llobet, the great masters of post-Romanticism, close this survey striding with infinite musicality across the most representative compositions of four centuries of the Spanish guitar. This special edition marks, as well, the departure point of a new process of collaboration between José Miguel Moreno and the label which he helped to create, with brand new recordings being planned, which will appear from the autumn of this year onwards.

This is a very important album which will be widely greeted by lovers of the Spanish Guitar. Tárrega was in many respects the founder of the modern Spaniosh Guitar movement, in that he not only was of the greatest importance in introducing a new style of guitar playing, but also the instrument on which it should be played. Before his death in 1909, Tarrega wrote and arranged much music for the guitar, and we have on this record a unique selection, embracing his own compositions as well as several of his best-known transcriptions. The Swiss guitarist Michael Erni is one of the finest currently before the public, and the recording quality is virtually state of the art. This is one of the very few CDs entirely devoted to Tárrega.