Andrea González Caballero Plays Preludios de Primavera by Joaquín Clerch

Spanish guitarist Andrea González Caballero performs Preludios de Primavera, Homenaje a Francisco Tárrega (2005) by Joaquín Clerch (born 1965 in Havana, Cuba). Movements listed below. This comes via her excellent YouTube channel. Recorded at Immanuelskirche Wuppertal, Germany. You can find the sheet music on Amazon.

• I. Primavera
• II. Las olas de Moncofa
• III. Homenaje a Tchaikovsky
• IV. El Adiós
• V. Y si pienso en la Habana…
• VII. Cuando tu no estás
• VI. Souvenir de Granada

Great playing as usual by Caballero with nice footage from this concert that I’ve featured a few times. Clear and direct playing but beautiful phrasing throughout and plenty of virtuosity to spare. There’s a great writeup on this by Keith Anderson via this Naxos album:

Born in Havana in 1965, the guitarist and composer Joaquín Clerch studied the guitar and composition in his native city before continuing his studies at the Salzburg Mozarteum, where he was a guitar pupil of Eliot Fisk and worked in early music with Anthony Spiri and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, graduating there with distinction in 1991. He has won an international reputation as a guitarist and since 1999 has held a professorship of guitar at the Robert Schumann University in Düsseldorf.

Clerch’s Preludios de Primavera (Preludes of Spring), homage to Francisco Tárrega, consist of seven short pieces for guitar, a tribute to a form used by Tárrega. The inspiration for the work came to the composer in April 2005 and the set of pieces was completed in July, each dedicated to a friend or a member of the composer’s family. The first prelude, Primavera, slow and expressive at first, is preceded by a line from the Cuban song-writer and lyricist Silvio Rodríguez from his Mariposas (Butterflies), ‘Todo lo que tocas se hace primavera’ (All that you touch turns to spring), a suggestion of the Latin-American element that lies behind the pieces. Las olas de Moncofa (The Waves of Moncofa), headed by a quotation from Raúl Roa, was written in April 2005 at Moncofa on the Gulf of Valencia. Homenaje a Tchaikovsky (Homage to Tchaikovsky) reflects the Russian composer’s melodic idiom, while the mood of El Adios (The Farewell) is prefigured in sad lines of farewell from a love poem by Pablo Neruda. Y sì pienso en la Habana (And if I think of Havana), written in Germany, leads to the essentially Spanish Souvenir de Granada, and the set ends with a gentle dedication to Clerch’s daughter Minerva, Cuando tu no estás (When you are not here).