In the history of the modern guitar
Andrès Segovia’s unique position
as the "apostle" has tended
to overshadow many of his approximate
contemporaries. Doremi has seen it as
their task to correct this picture by
reissuing some earlier guitar recordings
to contrast with Segovia’s. It is an
honourable task and it is only to be
hoped that the discs will sell in sufficient
quantities to encourage them to carry
on with their work.
The present disc is
the fourth volume and alongside Segovia
we meet Isabel Maria Luisa Anido Gonzales,
to give her full name. She was born
in Buenos Aires in1907 and her father
was "an aficionado and amateur
player who founded a review, ‘La Guitarra.’",
Jack Silver writes in his informative
note. Little "Mimita" (her
nickname) took some introductory lessons
from her aunt but used to sneak into
the room and hide under a bureau, when
Domingo Prat, a pupil of Llobet’s, gave
lessons to her father. Her father caught
her one day but when he realized that
the girl had picked up everything she
had heard and could play it by ear,
he bought her a little guitar and started
to teach her himself. Only three months
later she was ahead of her father and
began to study with Prat. She also took
some lessons with Llobet and Josefina
Robledo, who was a student of Tarrega’s.
She started giving recitals at an early
age and made a great impression on Llobet,
with whom she often performed and also
recorded some duets, which will appear
on a future Doremi volume. After a long
break following her father’s death in
1933, she resumed her concert activities
in 1950 and toured widely in South America,
Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan,
recording quite extensively. As late
as 1989 she made a live recording in
Cuba and in the 1990s moved to Barcelona
where she taught. She passed away on
June 4, 1996.
On this disc we hear
her two Victrola sides recorded in the
early 1930s: the Rubinstein Romance
and Albeniz’s Cadiz. The guitar
was rather grateful to reproduce even
in those days, sounding much better
than contemporaneous piano recordings.
Jacob Harnoy who made the remastering
has removed most of the surface noise
from the old 78s, which seem to give
a truthful picture of what she sounded
like all those years ago. The sound
is in fact more open and less dim than
the Russian Melodiya recordings that
constitute the rest of her contribution
to this disc, and they were made
more than twenty years later.
There is no doubt that
her technical prowess was well up to
the demands of this repertoire and compared
to many later players she conveys an
improvisatory feeling with often wide
rubatos and a rhythmically free phrasing.
But listen to Tarrega’s Variaciones
sobre la Jota Aragonesa (track 4)
and there is no lack of rhythmic incisiveness
and precision. The whole piece is a
formidable tour de force with percussive
effects and fluent playing – but again
she is very generous with rubato. It
is also interesting to note that she
plays Albeniz’s Granada and Asturias
as well as Granados’s Danza No. 5
in her own transcriptions, not in the
commonly heard ones by Llobet and Segovia.
Maria Luisa Anido first
met Segovia when she was 10 or 11, while
Segovia was somewhat past twenty at
the beginning of his career. Through
the years they often met, each being
vouchsafed long and active lives. Segovia’s
part of the disc was recorded by Decca
in 1944 but not released until 1949.
Here we find music spanning five centuries,
from Milan’s Renaissance Pavanes
via de Visée’s Baroque dances
to Moreno Torroba’s pieces written specifically
for Segovia. Most of this music is not
in the first place virtuoso music, it
rather stresses the lyrical side of
Segovia’s art, like the beautiful El
Noi de la Mare (Night by the Sea),
a song that Frederic Mompou also memorably
used in his collection Cançons
i danses for piano, where it is
Cançó No. 3. But
Tarrega’s Danza Mora is of course
a virtuoso piece and it is played with
Segovia’s customary elegance and flair.
All in all this is
a fascinating disc, first of all for
the opportunity to hear Anido and then
to have several portraits of her. There
is more to come.
Göran Forsling
see also review
by Jonathan Woolf
Maria Luisa Anido (guitar)(1–8), Andrès
Segovia (guitar)(9–24) 
for
details
