Mauro Giuliani: Scottish/ Irish Songs (Newton Classics Audio CD 3-disc set)  

Cartoni/Casoli/Scattoli
Songs/Etudes/Rossiniana

Mauro Giuliani is one of the most popular composers you may never have heard of, unless you’re a guitarist. He was to the guitar what Paganini was to the violin: a performer, composer, entrepreneur and teacher of diverse and prodigious talent. He harnessed the early-19th-century’s growing fascination for the performer as virtuoso, and the evolving technology of the guitar, to forge a conspicuously successful career that was curtailed only by his early death at the age of forty-nine.

Born in the heel of Italy, he moved further and further northwards, where the money and fame was, graduating from a position in Bologna towards the cultural pole-star of Europe, Vienna, where his first compositions were published while he was in his twenties. These included some of the studies on this fascinating anthology: aimed at domestic tuition, to be sure, and still popular as such, but full of agreeable and arresting melodies.

The works on CDs 1 and 3 show how sure Giuliani’s ear and eye were for the main chance. Capitalising on the success of Rossini’s operas, and the popularity of northern European folk melodies (just as Haydn and Beethoven did with their piano-trio arrangements), Giuliani reeled off variation sets and pot-pourris as occasion and publishers demanded.

His concertos are still on the fringes of the repertoire. These solo works may be less well known, but they are no less delightful, especially in these modern and sensitive performances.