This album showcases recent works for two guitars by the Chilean composer and guitarist Javier Contreras. He is joined by fellow Chilean guitarist and pedagogue, José Antonio Escobar – a decisive figure in Contreras’s musical development – to explore the composer’s inventive harmonic and cosmopolitan influences, which range from South American folk music to jazz. The Sonata for Two Guitars evokes the uniquely versatile sirilla dance in a work that marries introspection with vitality and virtuoso flourish. Elsewhere, Patagonian folkloric elements, exotic dances, high-speed dialogues and exquisite colours are conjured up in music of subtlety and energy.

Dúo Sudamericano seeks to primarily expand Latin American guitar duo repertoire: José Antonio Escobar is one of Chile’s foremost classical guitarists, acclaimed for his refined musicianship and his contributions to the Latin American repertoire and has recorded widely for Naxos.

‘[Escobar] is an excellent player, with a fluent technique and an expressive imagination. He is an excellent advocate for this music’, wrote American Record Guide on 8570341, and of his Milan album on 8573305 Fanfare wrote, ‘there’s no denying the loveliness of [Escobar’s] playing. His touch is very clean, in the sense that the extra-musical noises one sometimes encounters on discs of music for plucked instruments are virtually absent here’.

Javier Contreras, a former student of Escobar and the winner of multiple composition and performance competitions is developing a notable career as a composer and classical guitarist.