So much of the abundant output of early nineteenth-century guitar composers is of the kind which, pace The Bard, is long in wind but stays not long in the memory that recitals (whether live or recorded) tend to permutate the same few pieces. The appearance of something fresh (and worth hearing) is not lightly to be ignored, which certainly holds good for the Caprices of Legnani, brief and to their points, ten of them asking no more than 11 minutes of your time. Luigi Legnani (1790-1877), a friend of Paganini, was famous for making guitars, playing them, and composing for them—over 250 works, but he has been largely ignored by today's performers.
His Caprices are rare birds in that they embrace all keys, a thing to which guitar composers have, given the nature of the instrument, not often been given. The ten on this record exploit a fair range of textures and make spectacular technical demands that the performer once described to me as being ''on the edge of possibility''; here the balance comes down firmly on the right side, as it did in his Wigmore Hall recital last year. Guitarists who are easily depressed by such displays of awesome technique, allied to musicality, should avoid this LP like the plague. The more garrulous Giuliani's Giulianate (three, of his eight) are not profound human documents but the first two trade pleasantly in the language of the salon and the last is ebullient and florid.
Paganini's trite (but not exactly brief) Sonata, and Sor's Zauberflote Variations seem, like the poor, always to have been with us, whilst the Diabelli Sonata has been in and out of the catalogue over the years. All three are more than adequately played here, though one wonders whether those who choose so high a tempo for the Sor have ever heard ''Das klinget so herrlich'' in its original setting. There are now many more fine guitarists than there are companies to record them, so it is a pleasure to find Fernandez receiving the chance he has been waiting for since 1976, the year of his notable competitive successes. In all respects he is one of the best players around and, though it emphasizes his slightly hard treble sound, the recording does him full justice.'