My experience with Siccas Guitars has been very good and I am happy to say that they are now including my reproductions of historic instruments. My latest Torres copy has just arrived at their shop and is looking very good. See it here. I do photograph my instruments sometimes just to keep track of them but my skills with the camera are not great so I like to see the photos that others take of my guitars.
For those of you that don’t know this guitar is a copy of SE 153 and uses the same woods as the original. One of these was included in a Torres exhibition recently with 5 other copies by other makers in Badalona. They were all played in concert and I was very pleased with how mine sounded.
Yesterday Vicente Coves of the European Guitar Foundation presented the first Festival de la Guitarra de Granada. Members of the guitar community in Granada have long believed that the number of great makers past and present in this city have made it deserving of a festival as important as that of Córdoba. As a matter of fact the book “The Granada School of Guitar-makers” came out of a failed attempt to create a festival such as this one.
This initiative is to be applauded and we should all work together to make it a success. Activities will take place in July and August and October. In addition to the concerts shown below, highlights of the festival include well-deserved hommages to Antonio Marín and Eduardo Ferrer; both very important in encouraging the number and the quality of the guitar-makers working here today. A guitar-building contest will be celebrated as well with an international jury.
I am lucky enough to have as my friends and/or clients some of the great spanish guitarists and teachers. I met Javier Somoza while I was working with the 1924 Santos Hernández guitar for my article in Roseta published last year as he was executive editor for that issue. We finally got to have a drink and a meal together at the Madrid presentation of the journal. He played two pieces on the original guitar at that time and told me that he had plans to record this cd. The guitar is an excellent example of perhaps the best maker Spain has ever produced and the recording certainly does it justice. The music is well-chosen and very well played.
I am pleased to see that the cd (available starting today!) has excellent distribution and can be bought in most european countries. I am not sure if Brilliant has U.S. distribution but I am betting that they do. In searching for these links I see that in some countries it will be July 7th before the cd is available.
Juan José has just won second prize at a guitar competition in Bilbao. Congratulations! I made this guitar for him last year and I am very pleased to see that it is serving him well. What a great young player. Competitons are very stressful and difficult to face but if you have the stomach for it you can use them as a springboard to launch your career. Good luck with the next one you decide to participate in.
Closing night at the exhibition Granada, ciudad de la guitarra was a great success. Some people had to be turned away at the door because of the 100 person capacity limit on the hall. I had heard that Edson Lopes was a great guitarist but he exceeded expectations and delighted everyone in the crowd. It is always a pleasure to attend a guitar concert where the audience is not made up exclusively of guitar-makers and guitar players. He played a varied programme including Carulli, Sor, Turina and Moreno Torroba. My wife and I had the pleasure afterwards of sharing a meal with him and his son along with Jose Luis Vigil and Marcus Toscano. Thank you maestro for a great evening.
