I picked up a few discs of guitar music by Mertz but mostly Sor. I'm starting to see why Sor is so well respected. He actually tackles some longer-scale forms and has a nice tuneful way about him. I don't remember if it was he or Tarrega who was regarded as the 'Beethoven of the guitar' but I don't quite see it. I mean, I can sort of see how relative to the scale of what the guitar can accomplish compared to what the orchestra accomplishes; and then taking that into consideration in light of what Sor (or Tarrega?) achieved at the time ... yeah, I guess the shoe fits. But it seems Beethoven stretched the boundaries not only of technical accomplishments but of formal and theoretical accomplishments, too, and for this reason no non-guitarist music historian or critic would ever take seriously that being the 'Beethoven of the guitar' was anything more than egregious hyperbolic sucking up to a guitarist composer who doesn't even register beyond the world of the classical guitarists. Which is a little unfair both ways because I can see why Sor is well-regarded and, taking the blinders off folks, Beethoven wrote some pretty awful music along with all that good stuff.
Well, a short update of things that aren't exactly happening but could happen. I've sent off a few music scores to different musicians and while everyone's busy now amongst those folks there's some interest, so that in itself will suffice for now as far as I'm concerned.
For budget reasons and some future plans I'm taking a break from most concerts, or at least specifically symphonic concerts. So far there's just two local shows I plan to see. One is when Seattle Symphony plays Bluebird's Castle and a piece by Kurtag (I've got reasons for that that I won't reveal here); and the other is coming up this Saturday. A Messiaen/Prokofiev/Stravinsky/Debussy concert program is pretty hard for me to resist.
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