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When Everything Sings: A Guitar Recital


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Nícolas Porto Silva full profile / Solo guitar / 1 musician


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“When Everything Sings” brings together works Andrés Segovia recorded in New York and others that were dedicated to him but never made it into his recordings. Segovia played an important role in encouraging composers who were not guitarists to write for the instrument. His recordings helped establish a repertoire that is still widely performed today, although many pieces written for him remained relatively unknown. Some he never played, while others disappeared from his programs after only a few performances.

The first half of the concert is dedicated to three of these composers: Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, Albert Harris, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Their music reflects different approaches to writing for the guitar, from the Brazilian modinha and seresta in Lorenzo Fernandez's Suite Brasileira No. 1 to the Neoclassical writing of Harris's Sonatina. The second half includes works by Manuel Ponce, Federico Moreno Torroba, and Francisco Tárrega that Segovia recorded in New York. Among them are three pieces by Ponce that Segovia recorded under the name of the eighteenth-century lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss, concealing their true authorship for decades.

The title comes from an idea that has interested me for some time: how much of the guitar repertoire seems to have been written with the human voice in mind. Sometimes the connection is obvious, as in the Brazilian modinha or the Aria from Harris's Sonatina. In other pieces, the impression of singing comes from the way a melody is shaped, even when surrounded by dances or passages of great technical difficulty. This is what I find particularly interesting about bringing these works together. They were written by composers with very different musical backgrounds, yet each found a way to make the guitar sing.


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