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Midsummer's night

CD

Midsummer's night / Jonathan Paget, guitar.

  • Published by Move Records — 2008 [MD3322] — 1 CD
  • Purchase Price: $22.73 (Usually ships in 1-6 days) — Add to Cart
  • Library Availability: CD 1903 — Available for loan

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Featured Australian works

  Work Composer PerformersDurationMP3
From Kakadu (1993) for solo guitar
Recorded/performed at: Colgate-Rochester Divinity School Chapel, New York, on 2008.
Peter Sculthorpe Jonathan Paget 11 mins, 30 sec. Buy as MP3
Into the Dreaming (1993) for solo guitar
Recorded/performed at: Colgate-Rochester Divinity School Chapel, New York
Peter Sculthorpe Jonathan Paget 5 mins, 13 sec. Buy as MP3

Product details

Here begins an enchanted journey of magic, mischief, dreams, and romance - a
fantastical world akin to that of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its capricious fairies casting love-spells over mortals lost in the woods at night.

Nothing captures this Shakespearean imagery more vividly than the Five Bagatelles by English composer William Walton (1902-1983). As the title suggests, these pieces are essentially light-hearted in character; despite their fiery virtuosity and stormy passions they are little more than trifles.

Central to this disc, are the works of the Paraguayan guitarist and composer, Agustin Barrios (1885-1944). A hopeless romantic, Barrios deliberately cultivated a fantasy persona, namely that he was a Guarini Indian chief taught by Catholic mission fathers. He commenced marketing himself as the "Paganini of the guitar from the jungles of Paraguay" The mystical and magical side of this persona is captured in many of the composer's poems, but most famously in ProfesiĆ³n de fe ("Profession of Faith"), which portrays the guitar as "a mysterious box" given the composer by TupĆ”, the great spirit, while "in the middle of the greening forest," along with "six silver moonbeams" (representing the strings of the guitar), "with which to discover its secrets".

The works by Sculthorpe on this disc portray a very different sort of dreaming: one related to the concept of the dreamtime, the mystical time of creation in the beliefs of the Australian Aboriginal. Into the Dreaming began its life as a cello solo and was later expanded into a longer guitar solo at the instigation of John Williams. Also from Peter Sculthorpe comes the work, From Kakadu. The first and third movements are based on the "Kakadu melody", a lament from the Elcho Islands. The setting of the "Kakadu melody" in the first movement is taken from Sculthorpe's first guitar concerto, The Visions of Captain Quiros (a work now withdrawn). The fourth movement of From Kakadu employs another Torres Strait melody previously used in Songs of Sea and Sky (1991) for clarinet and piano. This melody is combined with motives from the second movement (which are derived from the Elcho Island Lament), to create a complex contrapuntal web expressing a sense of rapturouscontentment. Its long singing line is spun
out in the final coda, as if transcending mundane reality and finally entering the timeless realm of the dreaming.

from the CD liner notes by JONATHAN PAGET


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