Franco Cavallone
Les Productions D’Oz: 15 pages
With fingerings by Cristiano Porqueddu, here are Six Jewish Songs written by this Italian guitarist/composer whose music I have come across a number of times before. As always they are interesting, full of a large number of voices that come and go throughout all the pieces, and as a result are intermediate to advanced in difficulty.
AS well as the voice writing , the pieces often use chords of three or four notes throughout and so part of the difficulty factor is being able to effortlessly move from the one to the other , instantly without any obvious difficulty.
My only caveat with the set as a whole, (and individually the entire group of six make wonderful solos), is that every piece is in D minor, with a dropped 6th to D, and so after three of four I started to get a little tired of the similarity of the chord sequences as, being Jewish melodies, and often somber, and serious, I found the same chords in every one of the pieces. Now this might not be a problem to any number of guitarists, but to me, I wanted a couple at least to be set in different keys so that, even if the chord sequences from one piece to another were similar, they wouldn’t sound quite as similar, when written in a different key.
Other than that the set is well – written, always contrapuntally interesting, and each one is substantial by itself, but I could see a number of them being fine as a suite in a concert environment.
Chris Dumigan