Though I am far, far more a fan of Haydn than Mozart this one's worth watching because the music is good (I didn't say I hate Mozart) and Stricagnoli's doing two-handed tapping on the guitar (note the sock strategically wrapped around the neck close to the nut). It's like his right and left hand are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers doing some dance routine that gets the music to sound.
Or maybe Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor from the first half of Singin' in the Rain.
I could say we guitarists have shown more and more interest in adapting and investigating non-guitar music across a variety of genres in the last fifty years but it is not always clear if there are any signs that non-guitarist musicians are returning the favor.
Then again the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Innervisions came and went recently and I haven't heard of a single academic book about that incredible album being published. As Kyle Gann ranted in The Musicology Ladder there's a bunch of theorists who'd rather crank out the 100th book on Brahms or Schubert or the usual suspects than to put out one brand new book doing a deep dive into the piano sonatas of Muzio Clementi (Mozart ripped on Clementi but his music wasn't actually all that bad, some of his pieces are fine).
Regulars know that despite all the delays and fits my passion project is to go through all the solo guitar sonatas of the Bohemian guitarist composer Wenzel Matiegka. I not only take Gann's point I'd double down on it and say that I have not come across anyone attempt to synthesize and observe 20th century approaches to sonata forms in just the classical guitar literature. I can hope that someone like Anthony Glise or Stanley Yates could tackle the topic but the person who most jumped to mind as writer enough and composer enough to have pulled off the feat in my estimation (Angelo Gilardino) is, sadly, no longer with us. Ophee could have done it, too, probably. But I digress.
