Eleftheria Kotzia is a young Greek lady who has settled in London, bringing with her the kind of freshness—musical and personal—that makes for well-filled halls and does credit to the guitar. She is in love with both her instrument (which she plays very well) and its music, and this is as clear in her debut recording as it is on the concert platform. The first, quickly gained impression is of clean, strong technique, superb and sensitively varied tone, and natural musicality, it remains after the final sounds have died away. In the heat of the concert hall's moment Kotzia is sometimes prone to impetuous excess, but there is no trace of it here.
Most items in this programme are first recordings, of which the most important is Tippett's The blue guitar, the third link in an inspirational chain, preceded by Picasso's painting of an old man with a guitar and Wallace Steven's poem The man with the blue guitar. This is one of the guitar's twentieth-century masterpieces, one that becomes cohesive only when the player can penetrate its kaleidoscopic emotions and command the necessary technical means to communicate them—as Kotzia can and does. Delerue's Mosaique calls for, and gets, like effort to reveal its strength. The 'pops' of the programme are the Villa-Lobos Preludes, which Kotzia is not the first to reorder to make them more satisfactory in integral performance; they are played with great conviction, and if she does not exactly follow all the composer's markings, neither do most others.
The rest is easy listening—and none the worse for that: the three preludes of Pujol (there are five altogether) refreshingly establish their South American character without resort to cliche and Kotzia is utterly and infectiously in tune with the Greek music of Giorginakis and Fampas, her teacher. A final word of praise is due to John Taylor, who engineered the magnificent recording of this, one of the most enjoyable guitar recitals I have heard for some time.'