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Eight years into this blog, it finally occurs to me that if I had instead called it "a-players" or some such and focused on performers and composers, I could have been the People Magazine of contemporary composition, instead of, in effect, recognizing written manuscripts. This critical decision would have certainly increased pages views; on the other hand, I was never much of a people person...
Anyway, I'm reading about NYC Duo. Here's how they ended up performing a composition by Frederic Hand:
Being that classical guitar has deep roots in Spanish culture we decided that we needed to somehow pay homage to this fact. We decided that it would be too easy to add Gypsy flamenco to our set and say we covered Spain. In researching Spanish culture we decided that for our program we were going to add music of the Sephardic Jew. I came across Fred Hand’s settings of“Sephardic Songs” for soprano, flute, guitar and double bass. After contacting Fred Hand and discussing the possibility of arranging his music for violin, flute and guitar, we went ahead with the arrangement. Fred Hand’s settings of“Sephardic Songs” are heart wrenching tunes that display the tragic beauty of the middle ages.
By the way, Mr. Hand is the official guitarist of the Metropolitan Opera. One wonders his stand on the electrical amplification question.
catalog depth test: emusic 1, rdio 0, youtube 0, spotify 0 (no change from last post, unfortunately)
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