<<<  <<  -- 5 --  Howard Smith    HEART OF GENIUS  --  >>  >>>

Within the 57-minute 'DV Doco' Segovia performs three complete pieces [watch and listen -- 'Los Olivos' chapter 18, 44:35-45:35] and further excerpts from the repertoire serve as a soundtrack for cameras lingering around the shimmering Spanish countryside. We visit and revisit the maestro through interviews, performances, and his emerging story -- in one extended dream-like sequence, a child cradles a baby while a donkey trots amidst wooded Mediterranean slopes as Segovia reads from Nobel Prizewinner (Literature 1956) Juan Ramón Jiménez' lyric poem Platero and I.

No one else put a single instrument on the classical map in quite the same way -- he revived works of Mauro Giuliani (1781-1828 ), Fernando Sor (1778-1839), Ferdinando Carulli (1770-1841) and Antonio De Torres Jurado (1817-1892) -- and also transcribed lute works of Bach. Today's guitarists owe Segovia an incalcuable debt for the classical guitar's prominence, for its acceptance at universities and academies, for innovations in technique, for widening its audience and for much of today's core repertory.

Until the Second World War animal gut and silk were the materials from which guitar strings were manufactured, and Segovia was constantly alive to their limitations.

Continue >>

For help listening to the sound extracts here, please refer to our questions & answers page.