and the guitarist has posted it at his official Youtube channel.
Enjoy.
Way, way back when I was a kid my first exposure to Pictures at an Exhibition was through excerpts of it used to punctuate the soundtrack of episodes of, wait for it, The Smurfs.
Some insanely difficult and frenetic passagework shows up at about 3:30. You will know it when you hear/see it!
You have to see it to believe it. Matanya Ophee wrote what he described as the Yamashita chronicles when this performance happened and in the wake of different responses in classical guitar journalism and scholarship about whether what Yamashita was doing was "possible" or "musically worthy". I've got the score for this arrangement and he didn't just play some jaw-droppingly difficult passages, he also shifts tunings across the whole cycle. There's piles of mid-performance scordatura, tuning changes where he'll start with drop D; drop the A to G, raise the G to A, raise the D back to E and do things like that throughout the performance.
Some guitarists regarded that series of mid-performance tuning changes as musically unsuitable. Matanya Ophee's response to those objections at the time was to say, more or less, "Guess what? This guitarist has forced the rest of us to rethink altogether what is `practical' since he has done this in performances on tour."
Our instrument is still relatively new enough that it's been more than just possible for guitarists to show up in each generation who force all of us guitarists to reconsider what is "impossible". The guitar has many well-known and fairly severe limitations in what it can do. But guitarists keep exploring how to make the most of the outer limits of what it can do.
I was given a CD of Yamashita's recording of Pictures at an Exhibition and Stravinsky's Firebird decades ago. If you can find a copy of it the CD is so very much worth your time.
