17 pieces by Shand, Giuliani, Molino, Calleja, Rung, Ferrer, Baltar, Padovec, Darr, Carulli, Pelzer, Cottin, Matiegka, Castilllo, and Arcas: Arr David Jacques
Les Productions D’Oz: 40 pages
Continuing this fascinating series of rare pieces from the 19th Century, comes the 3rd volume. It’s a safe bet that you are largely not going to know the huge majority of these works, and at times even composers that you may not have played the music of. Not every piece is a wonderful, fabulous work, but then again, every one of the pieces is a lot of fun, and often written in a style that you might be unfamiliar with, depending on the composer of course.
Only Ernest Shand, and Mauro Giuliani have two pieces, all the rest of the composers have just one piece each, but just because everything is the 19th century, you find plenty of variety, from very classical, to the early romanticism, to late romanticism, and even some folk styled elements from the later composers. So for example, you have the very classical styled elements of the Giuliani, to the slightly more romantic touch of the Molino, being his Rondo from the Sonate Op6 No1 which is a lot of fun to the beautiful pieces by Ernest Shand, a composer I have got to know quite well via Stanley Yates’ edition of The Collected Works of Ernest Shand, available from Classical Guitar Study Editions ( and a review of which you will find elsewhere on this site).There is a jaunty little piece by Frederik Rung called Velkselsang , a lovely Charme de la Nuit , Nocturne Op36 by the well – known Jose Ferrer, a very tricky melodia Andante Cantabile by Ivan Padovec that hurtles around the fingerboard via a number of slides, and mordents and fast runs and is a lot harder than it at first appears, and a happy, dance – like Balalayka –Chanson Russe, by Alfred Cottin. That is only a small por5tion of the pieces on offer here, and everything in this book (as with the other two) is well worth playing, and just goes to show how much beautiful music for the guitar, was written long ago, that the huge majority of us simply don’t know. So in essence this is a lovely book, well worth your time and effort.
Chris Dumigan