Kazuhito Yamashita (Tokyo String Quartet) - Guitar Quintets

Files are mp3 at 320kpbs From the liner notes: The instruments that make up the string quartet are different-sized members of a single family: each has an arched top and back, four strings tuned in fifths, and no frets. The guitar, on the other hand, has a flat top and back, six strings tuned mainly in fourths, and frets. Leaving aside certain folk instruments, the guitar is not a "family" but usually comes in only one size and tuning. (Only one feature of form, the waisted body, is shared by the guitar and the violins in contrast to other stringed instruments with necks.) Of course, the instruments are normally played in strikingly different ways: the violins are bowed, the guitar is plucked. The differences between guitar and violin in construction and playing techniques have their effect in the distinct types of melodic figuration and harmonic idiom that are available, or even exclusive, to each. A simple strum on the guitar produces a full harmony that the violin cannot match, yet that harmony lacks the sustained and passionate power of the bowed string. The guitar is therefore often used to accompany a voice, flute, or other solo instrument, and violins are traditionally used like soloists even within the quartet. Historically, too, plucked and bowed strings have been associated with very different traditions. Ever since the Renaissance, when Harlequin was hardly ever found on the commedia dell'arte stage without his musicial prop, the sound of a guitar--even the classical guiar--has always suggested a popular, folk, or ethnic background. The violin family, though it's origins are not much nobler, has the air of the concert hall. The fact that few performers (with the notable exception of Paganini) have been virtuoso players of both instruments reflects their differences in status and tradition nearly as much as their differences in technique. But when these disparate instruments converse with one another in the context of a guitar quintet, they adopt one another's language. The guitar may borrow or echo a turn of phrase more abstract than usual; the violins may join enthusiastically in a driving fandango or a sultry tango. The guitar often becomes the special guest, a soloist by virtue of being an outsider, while the violins consort in the accompanying harmonies. The resulting textures, enhanced now and then by pizzicato or muting in the violins or by strumming with the nails on the guitar strings, are always colorful and engaging. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was trained in his native Florence but emigrated to the US in 1939, where he became a prolific composer of film music as well as more conventional concert works. Perhaps surprisingly, his Guitar Quintet (1950) follows the formal plan of a Classical string quartet far more closely than do the quintets of Boccherini, composed a century and a half earlier. Like a symphony, the customary quartet format comprises an opening allegro in sonata form, a lyrical slow movement, a minuet or scherzo, and a concluding allegro often in rondo form. Castelnuovo's only essential change in this plan is the substitution of a tango (though the score is headed "alla Marcia") for the usual minuet. Luigi Boccherini's musical career, begun at the age of 13, took him from his native Lucca to Vienna, Paris, and--for the greater part of his life--Madrid, where he supplied music for the royal family and married a Spaniard. His domicile in one of the less cosmopolitan centers of Europe may help to account for the fact that his chamber music seldom follows convention very strictly, but seems always to generate its own forms. Boccherini's guitar quintets are pastiches of movements adapted from works originally composed for other combinations--piano quintets, string quintets with two cellos, flute quintets, or string quartets of the traditional kind--yet the parts hang together well. The Quintet No. 4 in D begins with a slow Pastorale that broods moodily over the rustic idyll and then proceeds to an Allegro maestoso in which the cello playfully explores the most outlandish extremes of its technique. Boccherini was himself a virtuoso upon the cello, and this is but one of many passages in his quintets that give his instrument a particular chance to shine. The short slow movement, with a few succinct harmonies and a sustained "pedal point," introduces the Fandango: this begins reservedly enough but soon builds, with the relentless alternation of two chords, to a wild whirling climax, in which the sudden introduction of tambourine and castanets is hardly a surprise. Although the quintet No. 6 in G is ordered in the standard format, the third movement seems to be more than a minuet. It begins as a fugue, and in its trio section its harmonic content becomes as adventurous as the development section of a sonata movement might be. The final Rondo is actually a gigue in 6/8 time, which clearly owes its style to the energetic finale customary in a Baroque suite. As in the other dance movements of these quintets, the punctuating broken-chord figuration and rasgueado strumming of the guitar suggest a dance of freer abandon than we ordinarily expect from the courtly 18th century. -Lucy E. Cross 1. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet Op.143/Castelnuovo-Tedesco (5:50) 2. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet Op.143/Castelnuovo-Tedesco (8:26) 3. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet Op.143/Castelnuovo-Tedesco (4:12) 4. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet Op.143/Castelnuovo-Tedesco (5:29) 5. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet No. 6, G.450/Boccherini (5:47) 6. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet No. 6, G.450/Boccherini (3:23) 7. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet No. 6, G.450/Boccherini (4:16) 8. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet No. 6, G.450/Boccherini (3:40) 9. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet No. 4, G.448/Boccherini (6:00) 10. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet No. 4, G.448/Boccherini (6:50) 11. Tokyo String Quartet - Quintet No. 4, G.448/Boccherini (7:25)

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mamboze (2008-06-07)

Hi, could somebody seed please, I love Kazuhito. He is up there with Segovia as an innovator of guitar technique and interpretation, IMOH. Thanks in advance

mamboze (2008-06-07)

please seed; I'm stuck with a small %

Skeletronic (2008-07-26)

I've begun seeding this again. Check out my other Yamashita torrents as well.