Customer Reviews

Guitarra española [Box Set]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I cannot recommend this retrospective of just a small amount of Yepes's work highly enough.

He was a consummate technician and a knowledgeable interpreter of all musical idioms from the Middle Ages through to the height of the 20th Century avant-garde. His playing was characterized by intelligence, sensibility, clarity, power, majesty, poetry, and a devilish ability to separate and sustain contrapuntal lines.

In this box of 5 CDs you will find the definitive performance of Rodrigo's now famous "Aranjuez" concerto (singlehandedly made famous by Yepes). There are also 2 CDs with rare concertos by Salvador Bacarisse, Antonio Ruiz-Pipo, and Maurice Ohana.

The other 3 CD's contain solo guitar works by Sanz, Mudarra, Narvaez, Soler, Sor, Albeniz, Granados, Tarrega, De Falla, Turina, Bacarisse, Rodrigo, Llobet, Pujol, Moreno Torroba, Montsalvatge, Ohana, and Ruiz-Pipo.

Every guitarist and every lover of the instrument should own this set. If it is not available, also refer to a similar box set with the ASIN number B00006L6RN or another B000026ZRL.

The late Narciso Yepes is perhaps my favorite guitarist- Spanish or otherwse. With each of his recordings there is the sense of a madman, master, and poet at one with his instrument. I recently purchased "Guitarra espagnola" and have found endless enjoyment listening critically and as background while I work. This is the perfect "not background music" background music to play when you have guests. You and your guests will find yourself withdrawing from lively conversations to enjoy a poignant, sweet, or sinister moment with the music. This is a compilation of recordings from the past 20 to 30 years. The compositions span from the 17th to 20th century. The quality of the recordings is very good but at times varied. The availability of the compilation is very limited. Get it while you can! I also recommend Alirio Diaz and John Williams.

Narciso Yepes is my favorite classical guitarist. I was delighted to hear a couple guitar concertos I had never heard before. Ohana, Bacarisse, and Ruiz-Pipo were great discoveries. Again, Yepes is the BEST. Strongly recommended.

Having played the classical guitar professionally, listening to Narciso Yepes always stirs conflicting emotions in me. Who was I to be paid money for playing recitals and concerti when someone could play the guitar like Yepes? For that matter who was anybody else to be paid money to be paid to play. Yepes was so far beyond anybody else that there is simply no comparison. He didn't have the publicity machine that his drastically inferior contemporary Andres Segovia did, but he made the guitar sound like nobody else could. Of course he was playing the guitar that he designed and had built so that he could get sounds from it that he couldn't out of other guitars. It isn't well known but he was a concert quality pianist and violinist as well as being a composer. But I stir from the path. If you collect CDs buy this one. Your collection will not be complete until you do. There are only a few such mandatory purchases. One is Rachmaninoff playing his four concerti and the Rhapsody. However there the sound there is poor while the performance is beyond belief. Here the sound is wonderful and the performance is also beyond belief. You'll probably duplicate the Rodrigo and a few short pieces but that's about all. The price at Amazon is ridiculously low. Buy it here (I did) unless you can find it somewhere else for less.

I can't add much to the excellent reviews posted here, but I'll post this much, just to give information to others: I've seen other collections here on Amazon as well as single CDs, where reviewers were disappointed, having bought the CD mainly because it listed "Malagueña" as one of the works featured, only to find out that it was "not the version of Malagueña" they were looking for.

Music publishers, including Amazon, sadly, have proliferated many recordings mislabeled as "Malagueña" to the point where I have seen and listened to at least 4 different pieces. Some of these were actually named "Malaga" by the composer, but nobody in charge of labeling and editing a CD cares much, especially about classical music.

So anyone looking for what they consider "The Original Malagueña" (there's no such thing, it just happens to be whatever work they heard first bearing that name) would do themselves a favor, if they previewed the piece from the MP3 download version, rather than give poor reviews and a single star to this and other Yepes recordings, because it was not what they thought.

I own this recording and my 5-star rating of it is more than well-deserved.

It was really fantastic!!!. Perhaps i'd liked another presentation, with the boxes separated and clasified from 1-5. 5 is the total of cd's i found in a tiny box. I don't know what more to say. Thanks!!

I was looking for the a CD set of the original two LP records I have of Mr Yepes recordigns of 5 centuries Spanish guitar music. It was not very clear that I bought the right albums but the boy I gave them to as a present was very happy with these recordings