A new review of Smaro Gregoriadou’s album Reinventing Guitar came across our radar, and we just had to share it!

From the Classical Music Sentinel

SMARO GREGORIADOU
Reinventing Guitar!

All of you music collectors out there that have only one guitar CD on your shelves because you think all guitar recordings sound the same, re-organize your collection to make room for one more because now you will have two guitar CDs on your shelves. This recording by the Greek guitarist and composer Smaro Gregoriadou, as its title ‘Reinventing Guitar!’ suggests, opens up a whole new sound world in the realm of this humble instrument…

…The fact that Smaro Gregoriadou is a world class guitarist and musician is immediately obvious and clear. She approaches each work from a different musical angle, so to speak, based on its style, time period and origin. For example, her interpretation of the Bach Lute Suite BWV 995 is straight Baroque, in fact played with a guitar that sounds like a cross between a lute and a harpsichord. This is the world premiere recording of this amazing instrument, a triple-double-single course guitar in re-entrant tuning. And then of course, her reading of the Antonio José Sonata para guitarra, written in 1933, is true to the style and times in which it was composed, and this time it is played on a classical guitar with metallonylon trebles. What I found remarkable about the new instruments used in this recording, is the way they allow for a much more detailed separation of the treble and bass voices, of the different musical lines within each piece. One guitar almost sounds like two separate instruments. A guitar with scalloped frets and a movable back is featured in a piece by Scarlatti. There is also one work by the guitar-maker himself Yorgos Kertsopoulos, and two Balkan Dances by Smaro Gregoriadou herself that, the first one in particular, would require hours upon hours of practice for any guitarist to master.

A fascinating CD for any classical music enthusiasts, and a definite must-have for any serious classical guitar fans. The excellent Delos recording does not try to manipulate the sound in any way. It delivers the natural and attention grabbing sound of these wonderful guitars in a clear and open ambience.

Jean-Yves Duperron

Read the entire review at ClassicalMusicSentinel.com!