CDMidsummer's night / Jonathan Paget, guitar.
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Featured Australian works
Work | Composer | Performers | Duration | MP3 | |
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From Kakadu (1993) for solo guitar Recorded/performed at: Colgate-Rochester Divinity School Chapel, New York, on 2008. |
Peter Sculthorpe | Jonathan Paget | 11 mins, 30 sec. | Buy as MP3 |
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Into the Dreaming (1993) for solo guitar Recorded/performed at: Colgate-Rochester Divinity School Chapel, New York |
Peter Sculthorpe | Jonathan Paget | 5 mins, 13 sec. | Buy as MP3 |
Product details
Here begins an enchanted journey of magic, mischief, dreams, and
romance - a
fantastical world akin to that of Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream, with its capricious fairies casting love-spells
over mortals lost in the woods at night.
Nothing captures this Shakespearean imagery more vividly than the
Five Bagatelles by English composer William Walton (1902-1983).
As the title suggests, these pieces are essentially light-hearted
in character; despite their fiery virtuosity and stormy passions
they are little more than trifles.
Central to this disc, are the works of the Paraguayan guitarist
and composer, Agustin Barrios (1885-1944). A hopeless romantic,
Barrios deliberately cultivated a fantasy persona, namely that he
was a Guarini Indian chief taught by Catholic mission fathers. He
commenced marketing himself as the "Paganini of the guitar from
the jungles of Paraguay" The mystical and magical side of this
persona is captured in many of the composer's poems, but most
famously in ProfesiĆ³n de fe ("Profession of Faith"), which
portrays the guitar as "a mysterious box" given the composer by
TupĆ”, the great spirit, while "in the middle of the greening
forest," along with "six silver moonbeams" (representing the
strings of the guitar), "with which to discover its secrets".
The works by Sculthorpe on this disc portray a very different
sort of dreaming: one related to the concept of the dreamtime,
the mystical time of creation in the beliefs of the Australian
Aboriginal. Into the Dreaming began its life as a cello
solo and was later expanded into a longer guitar solo at the
instigation of John Williams. Also from Peter Sculthorpe comes
the work, From Kakadu. The first and third movements are
based on the "Kakadu melody", a lament from the Elcho Islands.
The setting of the "Kakadu melody" in the first movement is taken
from Sculthorpe's first guitar concerto, The Visions of Captain
Quiros (a work now withdrawn). The fourth movement of From
Kakadu employs another Torres Strait melody previously used
in Songs of Sea and Sky (1991) for clarinet and piano. This
melody is combined with motives from the second movement (which
are derived from the Elcho Island Lament), to create a complex
contrapuntal web expressing a sense of rapturouscontentment. Its
long singing line is spun
out in the final coda, as if transcending mundane reality and
finally entering the timeless realm of the dreaming.
from the CD liner notes by JONATHAN PAGET
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