Italian
English
"CLASSICAL GUITAR MAGAZINE"
England– September 2001
REVIEW by Stephen Kenyon
SEI STUDI by Ganesh Del Vescovo
Edizioni Musicali Sinfonica
This book of six studies is part of a series intended to cover the whole difficulty range. With commendable honesty and accuracy this set is labelled ‘very difficult’. Ganesh Del Vescovo is an Italian guitarist-composer, a past student of Alvaro Company and is particularly inspired by concepts from India music.
A major help is the inclusion of a CD of the composer’s performance and makes many things clear in a text that at times teems with detail and special techniques. The edition opens with seven pages of instructions and symbols, in Italian and English. Techniques include the composer’s own brand of pizzicato, humbly entitled “Ganesh pizzicato”. The studies cover tremolando, percussion, micro-tones, glissandi, Ganesh pizzicato and harmonics. Several of them are clearly, and to this player very attractively, tinged with Indian inflections. This however is not to the extent that Del Vescovo could be accused of developing fancy techniques only applicable to such exotic (to non-asian ears) sound-worlds. Nonetheless as with probably all composers who write studies there is a distinct sense that these studies would be of most use to somebody intending to study other works of this composer. Del Vescovo’s musical world is so particular and individual that a complete familiarity with these studies would be of limited use to a player specifically wanting background technique stretching, to deal with the likes of Carter or Henze, though some help may be had with Dillon or Ferneyhough.
I would though highly recommend this collection to players who wish to progress in complexity beyond Carter, Henze, etc. and also to composers, for fingerboard ideas. No jokes about needing four hands and an elephant’s trunk to play it please!
The edition is very dense in detail and the engraving and printing is unfortunately quite poor in quality: legible but somewhat fuzzy. Something of a letdown given the quality of the content.
Stephen Kenyon
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