Customer Reviews

Mel Bay Isaac Albeniz: 26 Pieces Arranged for Guitar

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The good. These Albeniz piano pieces are standards in the classical guitar repertoire. Stanley Yates' arrangements strive to remain faithful to Albeniz's intentions and to maintain accessibility for classical guitarists. He succeeds famously. His arrangment of Sevilla (for example) is lovely and--because he chooses to keep the main motive in the first position rather than the more common 12th--it's much more accessible than many needlessly more difficult arrangements. His take on the workhorse Asturias/Leyenda is similarly helpful. He provides good LH fingerings as well as peformance notes that include the reassuring observation that the rapid fire i-m droning was Segovia's invention and NOT Albeniz's. Along with this insightful comment, he offers alternative realizations of several passages. These aren't pieces for beginners, but it's exactly this kind of help that makes them accessible for us mere mortals. Thanks, Maestro.

The bad. The printing and binding are a mess. The first 18 measures of Asturias simply didn't get printed--something else is on the front of that page. (Thankfully, the beginning is esssentially the same as a later section ... I think.) Several other pieces suffered a similar fate--there are pages out of order and (worse) missing. Since the pieces I wanted--Sevilla, Malaguena and Tango--are intact, I won't return it, but how disappointing that Mel Bay would have done such a sloppy job with the printing.