Solo Piazzolla

Album review

No matter how many discs of the music of Astor Piazzolla you have, you owe it to yourself to check out this one by Manuel Barrueco. The reason is simple: this is one of the sweetest, most evocative, most virtuosic recordings of his solo guitar music ever recorded. Admittedly, it has this status in part because the Argentinean composer only wrote one work for solo guitar -- the Cinco Piezas from 1980, a work that has already been recorded more than two-dozen times -- while the rest of this disc, like the rest of any other disc of Piazzolla's guitar works, consists of transcriptions of works from other mediums. This, as it turns out, is one of the disc's great advantages because the works chosen for arrangement are especially lovely and the arranger turns out to be particularly gifted. In their original forms, the Invierno Porteña and Verano Porteña (Winter and Summer from Buenos Aires) are a wonderful combination of melting lyricism and haunting sensuality, while the six Tango-Études are light, lean, clean, and irresistibly rhythmic. But in these transcriptions by guitarist Barrueco, they are also astoundingly effective as intimate solo works astonishingly well-adapted for guitar. As those who've followed his career know, Barrueco's tone is clear and subtle, his technique strong and supple, and his interpretations models of soulful objectivity, all qualities richly exhibited here. Recorded in warm, vivid digital sound, this disc will please even the most discriminating guitar music fan.
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