No one is currently doing more to free the guitar from its rent-a-programme image than Sharon Isbin. She is not South American, nor does the Amazon flow through Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela or Paraguay, but none of this matters in the least. Others before her have hitched rides with specialists in particular areas and sounded like uncomfortable passengers, but Isbin has loved and felt this music for over a quarter of a century and in the company of Thiago de Mello and Paul Winter is entirely at home.
One might fear the addition of assorted percussive sounds and ‘rain-forest’ noises to be intrusive, especially in the familiar items, but they are atmospherically enhancing, handled with great discretion (delightfully in Grenet’s arrangement of Brouwer’s Cancion de cuna) and often rhythmically uplifting. Lauro’s setting of the traditional Seis por derecho has never sounded more full of vitality. The guitar has a wide range of tone colour, which Isbin exploits with skill and taste in traversing the gamut from tenderness to joyously rhythmic energy. The excellent annotation resides in a concertina-form booklet, which is user-friendly in that respect, but whose printing in white on a ‘rain-forest’ background is not equally so.
Recording is beautifully clear and well balanced. Waste no time in getting your hands on this disc, and don’t be surprised if it appears in my “Critic’s Choice” at the end of the year, distant though this is at the moment.'