From Classic to Jazz: Transcriptions for Guitar Quartet

The Nexus Guitar Quartet was formed in the early 1980s while its members were studying with Mario Gangi and Carlo Carfagna at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome. They graduated with honours in 1985–86. The musicians on this recording are Roberto Fabbri, Paolo Bontempi, Luigi Sini and Leonardo Gallucci.

As soloists, the four members have won prizes and served on juries at national and international competitions, including the Mauro Giuliani Competition in Bari, the Nicola Fago Competition in Taranto, the Concorso Chitarristico Città di Mottola and the Guerrero Competition in Madrid.

The quartet’s concert activity has included the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the RAI orchestras of Rome and Naples, the RTV orchestra of Ljubljana, the Orchestra Goffredo Petrassi, the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, the Associazione Amici della Musica di Castelfranco Veneto, the Centro Chitarristico Veneto, Perugia Classico and the Camerata Musicale Barese. Its festival appearances include Eco e Narciso, Dialogo con Maderna, Villa Massimo, the Beffiniano Festival, Darmstadt, Nuova Consonanza, Mittelfest, Antidogma, Nuovi Spazi Sonori, Andrés Segovia and Giuliani.

Its repertoire embraces twentieth-century and contemporary music, ranging from classical works to jazz. It has given first performances of works by Aldo Clementi, Francesco Pennisi, Camillo Togni, Ada Gentile, Paolo Arcà, Fabrizio De Rossi Re and Roy H. Zimmerman. The quartet plays Ramírez Gran Concerto guitars.

Béla Bartok: (b Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary [now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania], 25 March 1881; d New York, 26 Sept 1945). Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and pianist. Although he earned his living mainly from teaching and playing the piano and was a relentless collector and analyst of folk music, Bartók is recognized today principally as a composer. His mature works were, however, highly influenced by his ethnomusicological studies, particularly those of Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak peasant musics. Throughout his life he was also receptive to a wide variety of Western musical influences, both contemporary (notably Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg) and historic; he acknowledged a change from a more Beethovenian to a more Bachian aesthetic stance in his works from 1926 onwards. He is now considered, along with Liszt, to be his country’s greatest composer, and, with Kodály and Dohnányi, a founding figure of 20th-century Hungarian musical culture.

Darius Milhaud: (b Marseilles, 4 Sept 1892; d Geneva, 22 June 1974). French composer. He was associated with the avant garde of the 1920s, whose abundant production reflects all musical genres. A pioneer in the use of percussion, polytonality, jazz and aleatory techniques, his music allies lyricism with often complex harmonies. Though his sources of inspiration were many and varied, his music has compelling stylistic unity.

George Gershwin: (b Brooklyn, NY, 26 Sept 1898; d Hollywood, CA, 11 July 1937). American composer, pianist, and conductor. He began his career as a song plugger in New York’s Tin Pan Alley; by the time he was 20 he had established himself as a composer of Broadway shows, and by the age of 30 he was America’s most famous and widely accepted composer of concert music.

Igor Stravinsky: (b Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], nr St Petersburg, 5/17 June 1882; d New York, 6 April 1971). Russian composer, later of French (1934) and American (1945) nationality. One of the most widely performed and influential composers of the 20th century, he remains also one of its most multi-faceted. A study of his work automatically touches on almost every important tendency in the century’s music, from the neo-nationalism of the early ballets, through the more abrasive, experimental nationalism of the World War I years, the neo-classicism of the period 1920–51 and the studies of old music which underlay the proto-serial works of the 1950s, to the highly personal interpretation of serial method in his final decade. To some extent the mobile geography of his life is reflected in his work, with its complex patterns of influence and allusion. In another sense, however, he never lost contact with his Russian origins and, even after he ceased to compose with recognizably Russian materials or in a perceptibly Slavonic idiom, his music maintained an unbroken continuity of technique and thought.

Joseph [Kozma, Jozsef] Kosma
(b Budapest, 22 Oct 1905; d La Roche-Guyon, 7 Aug 1969). French composer of Hungarian birth. He studied at the Liszt Academy of Music (1926–8) then worked as a répétiteur and assistant conductor at the Hungarian State Opera. He began composing scores for Hungarian films in 1929, the year in which he went to Berlin to study with Eisler, and was active in performances staged by the Young Communist Group (known as ‘the Red Megaphone’). With the rise of Nazism, Kosma (who was Jewish) fled to France where he first found work as a café pianist. His meeting with the poet Jacques Prévert led to an engagement at the cabarets Le boeuf sur le toit and La folie de Lys Gauty, where he accompanied the singers Marianne Oswald, and Lys Gauty. Oswald, much admired by the poets Jean Cocteau and Raymond Queneau, made a lasting impression with her performances of Kosma's earliest settings of Prévert, La chasse à l'enfant and La grasse matinée. The director Jean Renoir used one of the Kosma-Prévert songs, A la belle étoile, in his 1936 film Le crime de Monsieur Lange, where it is sung by Odette Florelle. This began a long association between Renoir and Kosma, interrupted by World War II (when Renoir was in Hollywood), but re-established when he returned to France in the mid-1950s.

Kosma chose to remain in France during the war years, when he was obliged to spend much of the time in hiding, and what little music he composed was used by film makers either anonymously or under pseudonyms. His music for the pantomime scenes in Marcel Carné's Les enfants du paradis (1944) eventually led to his first postwar works for the stage, the ballets Le rendez-vous (with choreography by Roland Petit, a curtain by Picasso and sets by the photographer Brassai), and Baptiste, a reworking of material from Les enfants du paradis, which was staged by Jean-Louis Barrault in the first seasons of the Renaud-Barrault company. Later, the leading role was mimed by Marcel Marceau who collaborated with Kosma on three further pantomimes.