With Napoléon Coste (1805 – 1883) we leap forward to the Age of Romanticism and at the same time look back to the sixteen-year-old Roman Viazovskiy. In 1989 he stumbled upon a festival recording of the young Carlo Marchione that inspired him to want to study all the pieces in Marchione’s programme. "Concerts in the Ukraine have always been introduced by a compère," the guitarist recalls. "Because the live recording of this concert was of such poor quality, I was able to make out only the composer’s name but not the title of the piece. I was captivated by Carlo’s playing and immediately fell in love with the work. But no one in the Ukraine could tell me what it was called. Three years later I undertook my first concert tour of Germany and met my future teacher, Reinbert Evers. It was in his extensive library that I was fi nally able to find a copy of the work for which I had been looking for so long: the Introduction et Variations sur un motif de Rossini. Because these wonderful variations are very rarely performed I decided to include them in my concert repertory." In Coste’s case the Age of Romanticism emerges as highly conservative and even stolidly Classical. Coste received his earliest guitar lessons from his mother. He moved to Paris in 1830 and continued to study the guitar and composition, chiefly with Fernando Sor. He pursued a busy concert schedule until 1863, when a broken arm forced him to retire from the concert platform and to concentrate instead on teaching and composition. But he also took an increasing interest in instrument making. Together with the Parisian guitar maker René-François Lacôte, he developed a seven-string guitar that extended the instrument’s range by adding a "floating" bass string. But for the most part he was obliged to earn his living by working as a municipal administrator. The Introduction et Variations sur un motif de Rossini is a set of classical variations that subjects the theme to a sequence of elegant textbook variations. The delicate variation using harmonics is without doubt a dazzling jewel of the repertory, but the other variations, too, are no less remarkable for their highly effective glissandos and tricky trills. Right up to and including the wild scalar passages in the bass in the final variation, the composer places huge demands on his performer.


Joaquín Turina (1882 – 1949) provides a bridge to the 20th century. He was born in Seville and initially studied the piano with José Tragó in Madrid, then spent eight years as a composition student of Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, graduating in 1913. Following his return to Madrid he worked as a conductor and chorus master at the Teatro Real and elsewhere before being appointed to a chair in composition at the Madrid Conservatory in 1931. Joaquín Turina is regarded as one of the leading Spanish composers alongside Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla. For many years he was friendly with de Falla, with whom he shared the desire to give music a national, specifically Spanish character. But whereas de Falla conceived of this character as something artificially abstract, Turina related to Andalusian folk music. His principal instrument was in fact the piano, but for a Spanish composer not to write for the guitar was certainly tantamount to high treason. Composed in 1930, Turina’s Sonata op. 61 was first performed in 1932. Like so many other works that are now a part of the standard repertory, it was premièred by Andrés Segovia. Two highly virtuoso Allegro movements frame a delicate Andante. The musical language of all three movements makes clear the composer’s debt to his country’s folk music, for the writing is dominated by flamenco elements. Note the typical chordal shifts, the breakneck arpeggios, the rolling rasgueado fi gures and above all the tremendous range of colour that is so characteristic of Andalusian melodies. But these elements are embedded in textures that are artfully refined and, as such, far removed from the world of folk music. In recording this sonata, Roman Viazovskiy has returned to the original version, a version that diverges on a number of minor points from the first printed edition that enshrines Segovia’s performance of the piece.

The Brazilian composer Sérgio Assad was born in São Paulo in 1952 and is known chiefl y as a concert virtuoso, performing in the Duo Assad with his brother Odair. Since the 1980s they have enjoyed considerable international acclaim. But he has written for the guitar from the very outset of his career and has completed over fifty compositions, a number of which are now a part of the mainstream guitar repertory. He and his brother studied the guitar with Segovia’s pupil Monina Tavora in Rio de Janeiro. Although he later studied composition with Esther Scliar, the foundations of his musical education were in fact laid in the Brazilian choro – choros are folk music ensembles that generally comprise a mandolin or flute as a solo instrument and various guitars that provide the accompaniment. According to Sérgio Assad’s own testimony, it was his father who provided him with his earliest understanding of harmony and melody well before he acquired his theoretical knowledge. As a result, the influence of national folk music is self-evident for him. More recently his style has been more influenced by Middle Eastern music. For Roman Viazovskiy, Aquarelle of 1986 is "one of the most spectacular pieces in the modern guitar repertory – full of contrasts and both sensitive and energetic". Harmonically speaking, the Brazilian element is most apparent in the virtuosic third movement, a Preludio e Toccatino (a "little" Toccata), but the rhythms in the central and fi nal sections of the Divertimento are no less Brazilian with their samba-like accents. In general, however, the sonorities, with their constantly shifting values, may best be described as late Impressionist. In particular the apparently simple Valseana, with its rocking motion, both simultaneous and working in opposite directions, may justly appeal to Debussy as its source of inspiration, while the swiftly darting harmonic writing owes much of its artful slyness to the music of Ravel.

Thelonious Monk (1917 – 1982), the great individualist and one of the most influential musicians working in the field of modern jazz, especially bebop, had moved with his family from North Carolina to New York in the early 1920s. Living on the western fringes of Harlem he found himself already as a small child on the edge of the seething cauldron of modern jazz, in the first circle of hell. The rest is history. Extreme highs alternating with generally druginduced collapses, demonization and adoration, public appearances and recordings with the leading jazz performers of his age, and some of the most infl uential compositions of the 20th century which were breaking with conventions obtained even in the world of jazz. Here we find chords piled up on one another in ways that would probably have caused other composers to be locked up. No less remarkable is the paradoxical use of polyrhythms as part of a performance technique derived from stride and essentially based on solidly regular structures. Suff ering from serious depression, Monk died in New Jersey in 1982. The E fl at minor cadenza following the intro to Round Midnight (1940) soon became one of the acoustic icons of modern jazz. Th e chromatically descending bass line from which the narrative melodic voice emerges in giant steps from the very depths is one of the all-time greats of the jazz repertory. Countless recordings and countless interpretations have turned it into something not unlike a piece from the established classical repertory. Guitarists, too, especially those from the world of jazz, have repeatedly turned their hand to this altogether unique material. The recording made by Wes Montgomery in 1965 may still be regarded as definitive. "The arrangement that I have recorded here", says Roman Viazovskiy, "was prepared by a master in his field, Roland Dyens. I heard him play it fifteen years ago. My fingers were almost literally burning, so keen was I to play it, but I never had time to take it into my repertory. Now I have found the time – and whenever I play it, it is balm to my soul." Roland Dyens was born in Tunisia in 1955 but has lived in Paris since his early childhood. He studied with Alberto Ponce and has long been a much sought-after teacher and an acclaimed concert virtuoso. He owes much of his fame to his arrangements of well-known classics, generally jazz standards, for the sixstring concert guitar. Monk’s original is to a certain extent domesticated in Dyens’ arrangement, which underplays the wayward and subversive element in Monk’s early bebop style in favour of a brilliant and technically adept reinterpretation that adds a few blue notes to the rapid passage-work and provides the walking bass with a supple swing but which ultimately transposes the original material to a world that is musically more highly regimented. And yet this version also allows us to appreciate the polyphonic complexity of Monk’s harmonic writing: the Wanderer in Time looks in briefly on Weiss, thereby bringing his journey full circle.

It is now something of a tradition for each new release by Roman Viazovskiy to include at least one world-première recording of a work by the Siberian composer Konstantin Vassiliev (* 1970). The two men are close not only as musicians but also as friends: "When I moved to Germany, Konstantin helped me to get started," says Roman Viazovskiy. "We performed together as students in order to earn some money. Wherever we played, it was always his two-guitar arrangements of hits that were a runaway success. Even at that date I had the feeling that as a composer he would be a very interesting figure. He has developed his own musical language, and I play at least one of his works at each of my concerts." Roman Viazovskiy is ideally placed to première Vassiliev’s guitar works. Konstantin Vassiliev studied at the Academy of Music in Novosibirsk, where his teachers included Arkadii Burkhanov for the guitar and Sergey Tossin for composition. He moved to Germany in 1995 and continued his studies with Reinbert Evers and Georg Haidu in Münster. He writes mostly chamber music for the most disparate forces, but time and again he focuses on his principal instrument, the guitar. Zeitenwanderer (Wanderer in Time) is not only the title of the present album as a whole, it is also a kind of summation of it. Although it seems a slight piece, taking the form of a three-minute fantasy, it combines a number of characteristics from the preceding works, including the translucent part-writing of the Baroque. Note also the Classical understatement of its formal design, its fondness for Impressionist sonorities and the open-ended tonality of a number of passages that recall the world of jazz. In terms of the technical possibilities open to the modern guitar, it is, of course, very much abreast of its times.

Nicolai Kobus