Shand - Guitar Music | Brilliant Classics 96435

Shand - Guitar Music

£14.20

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Label: Brilliant Classics

Cat No: 96435

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 3

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 10th December 2021

Contents

About

The first ever album dedicated to the music of Ernest Shand, including several first recordings.

According to the guitarist Alberto La Rocca, Ernest Shand can be considered ‘one of the greatest composers for the guitar of all time’. Born into a musical family in Hull in 1868, Shand firstly learnt the rudiments of the instrument from his father before coming under the instruction of Catharina Pratten, a German guitarist who had performed as a child with Regondi and later with Gounod and Tárrega. She later married the English flautist Robert Sidney Pratten, settled in the UK and became known as ‘Madame Sidney Pratten’, and as one of the most celebrated guitar virtuosos of her day.

Shand quickly proved himself to be her most talented pupil, and Pratten declared that his compositions far surpassed her own. During his lifetime Shand was widely recognized as the greatest English classical guitarist and composer, but his music fell into obscurity soon after his death in 1924. His surviving output of 220 works reveals a guitar composer of great originality and charm who had a gift for spinning infectious melodies.

Many of these pieces were originally composed for Shand to perform himself on tours which took him afar as Australia. He retired from performance in 1897, however, after being assaulted at a concert in Nottingham by a Russian audience-member who had taken exception to a patriotic song. Thereafter he concentrated on composition, and his later music inflects his essentially Romantic style with bold modulations, modal writing and hints of the Impressionism that would become hallmarks of the revolution in guitar music wrought some decades later by Villa-Lobos above all.

The sentimental melodies and colourful harmonies of Shand's music impart a unique Victorian flavour which often seems to echo the sing-along anthems and nostalgia of English music halls. There is an instant, repeatable charm to the gently swaying rhythm of the Prélude et Impromptu; a teasing and memorable melancholy to the melody of the Morceau lyrique no.2; and a no less catchy wistfulness to the Légende which has survived on the fringes of the repertoire as probably his best known work.

In 2016 Brilliant Classics issued Alberto La Rocca’s collection of music (95369) by the most celebrated guitar virtuoso of the last century, Andres Segovia.

‘La Rocca’s technical facility cannot be faulted… We are fortunate to live in an era when these miniature master pieces have emerged from obscurity and when guitarists with the capabilities of Alberto La Rocca have embraced them, and found a place for them in recorded history for all to enjoy.’ – MusicWeb International

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