 |
|
This recording of Baroque music was quite a challenge: originally written for violin, lute or keyboard, all these pieces are my own 8-string guitar adaptations. To transcribe to an instrument that didn’t even exist in that period, I had to go to the essence, to the very soul of the music. I had to comprehend fully the language of the Baroque composers, to rediscover their sound, the structure and the meaning of their works, all on a completely different setting. I had to stay as close as possible to what was written originally and then use all capacities of my eight-string guitar to create my own versions. My guideline: It’s all about the music and the rhetoric. During my research I came across some wonderful settings, transcriptions by Francisco Tárrega (Ave Maria, Bach-Gounod), Kazo Kanatani (Purcell) and Ruggero Chiesa (Weiss). They all were an inspiration to me. The cooperation with Javier Salvador as the engineer of the recording studio was an added value: he is definitely part of the result you hear. He managed to give me all the space a musician needs to be creative. (Raphaella Smits)