Search - Mauro Giuliani, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Jennifer Ellis :: The Essential Giuliani, Vol. 1

OK I guess. Likewarm.

Ghost(Ghost(M)) | 11/30/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"A few years back, my friends and me, we had an idea of starting to play together again, some sort of chamber music, which, me playing the guitar, had to be something with the guitar, though not duos 'cause no one else plays the guitar; in fact the assemblage was quite absurd (many moons ago we were a rock band + a few "fellow travellers"). Predicament! Where there's a will there's a way though: thus I got me a bunch of guitar + something else records to see what we might adopt for the repertoir. This is one of the records I bought then. Well, so what can I say... no problem with performance, top notch as expected; music itself is nice, no question, but you know... grazioso, yes, but Giuliani is no Mozart. Finally, as is typical for non-solo guitar music, there's no dynamic balance: I don't know whether this orchestra uses "period" instruments or not, but they drown out the guitar, even despite their obvious attempts to play uber-pianissimo to the point of sound instability (especially noticeable in solo violin). No use: next to guitar everything sounds like a brass band -- even the flute, picking up after a guitar solo, sounds like a saxophone, deep and "chesty" sort of thing. Bottomline: I bought this record for a purpose (and it was good for that), but were it considered purely for musical enjoyment, I'd say, I'm not sure, three stars maybe -- the classical guitar is a weird instrument that's fine played solo, but in ensemble with anything bigger than a recorder it gets extirpated and sounds like an intermittently surfacing indistinct borborygmus deep inside the belly of the orchestral whale. Can't they mike it up a bit? What good is "purity" if you can't hear anything?"

Gracious

David Saemann | 07/25/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Richard Savino first made his name recording Boccherini's Quintets on a period instrument. It is not a long stretch from Boccherini to Giuliani, and the results here are just as winning. The Guitar Concerto, from an earlier release, is a real eye opener. Monica Huggett conducts a period instrument ensemble, with some wonderful wind playing. Savino plays the solo part with no audio highlighting, and it's a marvel to hear how he comes through the orchestration. Other highlights of the set are the Duo and the Variations with Huggett on violin. Huggett plays marvelously, with an unusually rich tone for a period instrument and a degree of expressiveness I've never heard from her before. The Trio goes very well, too, even if the two string instruments tend to drown out Savino from time to time. The solo works sound effortless and charming. The recordings, from three different venues, sound excellent, although there is some echo on a few of them. This set provides very good value if you want to explore this byway of the guitar repertoire."