Review of Nocturnal by Stefano Grondona, Stradivarius 2013

After almost six years of management of the Blog Chitarra and Dintorni Nuove Musiche I should be accustoms me: in spring time always arrives the new cd by Stefano Grondona. Punctual as Immanuel Kant and endowed with iron Teutonic discipline Mr. Grondona doesn't seem to know the least creative depression and not even the least delay in his recordings.
After having investigated in the creative mind of Llobet and to have granted some raids in the territories of Bach and Tarrega hourly Grondona returns to the most contemporary repertoire after an absence lasted different years. I make reference in fact to the LP "Grondona, Stephen: Guitar Works By Bach, Henze, Petrassi by Stephen Grondona" dated 1994..
The titleof this cd "Nocturnal"  reflects abundantly the calmest and intimate character of the music played by him, in the cd we find in fact the "Nocturnal after John Dowland" by Benjamin Britten, the "Five Bagatelles by William Walton. "All in Twlight and "Muir Woods" by Toru Takemitsu and "Five Impromptus" by Richard Rodney Bennett. All music with nocturnal characteristics, where the sound always to rise and to periodically bathe in the silence that surrounds it.
Grondona is a musician of rare musical intelligence and in this cd he confirms all of his cleverness, experience and preparation. What has left me some amazed listening to this cd is that the music interpreted by him “sing” as of the classical ones and not as passages of contemporary music. I have had the strange feeling "to listen to" these music as doing parts of a corpus of interpretations already defined inside the world of the classical guitar. As if I was listening to Carcassi or Giuliani.
I don't know how to understand it, if this derives from the particular interpretation of Grondona or from the fact that my ear for a long time by now is gotten used to these passages and perceives them as passages that their innovative push has exhausted and of which has gone defining an interpretative "form"that has made a new part of the classic repertorire.
Is The thing a problem? Not as it regards me, at least. Grondona is an exceptional interpreter and his cleverness is always confirmed, as they are the quality and the emotions that he knows how to express playing these passages. Stradivarius realizes another exceptional cd in this year, a perfect job for the "shelf" virtual or real for every who loves guitar, and not only the classical one.