The guitar festival held every year in Granada is now in full swing and I have been to a few concertsalready. I think I might catch Julia Trintschuk this week and Iliana Matos next week and of course I will watch the final of the guitar-making competition. Last night we saw Raphaël Feuillâutre play a repertoire which included pieces from the baroque period right up to relatively modern times. His playing was very musical and of a perfection which I think few today could show on such difficult and rapid passages. On Saturday I saw Carles Trepat who also offered an excellent concert with a very well chosen programme of pieces which are not so commonly played. The expressiveness and authenticity with which he plays is second to none. He plays these days with period instruments and gut strings. It really is just like stepping back in time to hear how these guitars sounded. He played his 1892 Torres and a guitar made by Domingo Esteso. I attended with a friend who also plays on historic guitars and he referred to Carles as “the poet of the guitar”.

Spain is beyond a doubt the birthplace and the historical focal point of the guitar. So why is there no national museum, why don’t we talk about the guitar heroes the way we do Velazquez, Cervantes, Goya, Buñuel, Dalí, Picasso, Lorca or Lola Flores? There are a few museums or cultural centres with a very narrow focus but even those are underfunded and ignored. One example of a great museum honouring a true star of the classical guitar is the Andrés Segovia museum in Linares which is visited by tourists and scholars, guitarists and guitar-makers. This newspaper article is a plea to the the different levels of government to recognize the importance of the this man and the work that has already gone into preserving that (our) heritage.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PoWOBEgoKf0

What an interesting visit to Comercial Impresores yesterday! Back in 2014, they printed the original “The Granada School of Guitar-makers” and are at this very moment printing the new version called “Granada and the Traditional Guitar”. On the colour table you can see one of the octavos (in this case twelve instead of eight) as we adjust the colour before printing the entire book. The short video shows the printer spitting out one printed side at a rate of 9000 per hour, seems a pity to only print 1500 copies of the book. The last photo shows the aluminum plates which are etched on the other side to take the ink.

Every year the festival of Córdoba publishes a fascinating book about a public figure within the world of the guitar. This is the complete collection of “Nombres Propios de la Guitarra”. Each book contains the transcription of the lectures which were presented the preceding year. This year they are starting a new collection which will probably have a different name because the connection to the guitar is not quite so direct. My lecture about the Rafael Casana guitar which Julio Romero de Torres painted so often was a success and especially entertaining thanks to Javier Riba. He spoke briefly about some of the paintings and played the guitar so that we could hear the sound of it after so many years. We know very little about Rafael Casana but by examining the guitar and the bibliography some details were brought to light. This article as well as the others presented over the following days will be collected in a book and published next year at this time.

 If you are interested in acquiring any of these volumes please contact IMAE. Contact page for IMAE

One of the highlights of my four days in Córdoba was the Andalusian Guitar Quartet on July 9. The concert consisted of only one piece of music: Cuerdas del viento by David del Puerto for soprano and guitar quartet. A challenging piece of music but full of beautiful poetry from Lorca and stirring musical passages. We were able to spend some time afterwards with the members of the quartet so I met Paco Bernier for the first time. I already knew Antonio Duro, David Martínez and of course my friend Javier RIba. Sachika Ito is the soprano who joins them for this vocal incursion and she came to dinner that night too. All in all a very enjoyable evening for us. You can catch the quartet this summer in Coria, Spain at the guitar festival there on August 6.