Julian Byzantine - Popular Guitar Classics (2002)

The Australian guitarist Julian Byzantine is a well-known and widely respected player. This CD is a compilation of fairly old recordings, mostly from 1981, and includes a number of ‘core repertoire’ pieces, like the opening Albeniz Suite and the Villa-Lobos Preludes. Many of the other pieces are fairly familiar, too, such as the haunting En los Trigales of Rodrigo, the Granados Andaluza, or the music from Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat, though it isn’t made clear who made these arrangements of piano or orchestral music.
One or two pieces were unknown to me, particularly the Lauro and Borges items, but there is a sense of a common style and heritage to all the music here, and these are attractive, undemanding works. The Borges Vals, in particular, is a real charmer that I was delighted to have become acquainted with.
Byzantine plays with unfailing style and musicianship, and is technically well on top of the music. He also produces some fascinating uses of special tone-colour, most notably in the little descending passages in Tárrega’s La Alborada, where he achieves a magical faraway metallic effect, like a mandolin heard in the distance.
An undemanding but very pleasing and well executed selection. Well recorded too, so that usual problems with guitar music of noisy shifts (no reflection on the player – they’re pretty well unavoidable) are not unpleasantly distracting. -- Gwyn Parry-Jones