A monograph on the chamber music for guitar by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is not a new operation, nor is it particularly original: the numbers of works that the Maestro bequeathed to the six strings significantly occupy the entire last season of the Florentine composer’s life and work. It was evident in his perception that “chamber music would be the salvation of the classical guitar”. However, this disc is not born from a compiling urgency, from a need to combine a catalogue and observe it with fetishism in its entirety – after all, there are many chamber pieces missing from the entire corpus, not to mention the vocal chamber music and the music for two guitars, here only partially addressed. Rather, from the desire to contemplate in a different perspective some elements of a rich legacy that still today stimulates and fascinates the interpreters who approach it.

The title Appunti (Notes) is anything but casual, as are the works chosen to represent it. In recounting this repertoire, my will – with the help of a homogeneous time span going from 1950 to the last days of the Maestro’s life – has been to highlight the possibilities of salvation that the guitar assumes through chamber music, with compositional skills that can still be defined as exemplary acts of bravura and happy inspiration, unsurpassed to this day. As on a notebook, the notes collected take shape, and become the argument for possibilities, then become thesis, evidence, and, eventually, memory.

Quartetto Felix:
- Vincenzo Meriani (violin)
- Matteo Parisi (cello)
- Francesco Venga (viola)
- Marina Pellegrino (piano)