video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6O2jO8MOjE&list=UUNH3GEoIz_ntIkdJEyhw7JQ

The Wine-dark Sea IV - Matthew Whittall
Rody van Gemert - Guitar (Uwe Florath 2010)
Assi Karttunen - Harpsichord (Henk van Schevikhoven 1997)
Live at the Church of the Holy Cross, Rauma/Finland
Rauma Festivo 2014

Composer's note:
The Mediterranean looms large in my family history and genealogy. Learning the mythology of Greece and Turkey 
as a child through books and bedtime stories, I came to associate this body of water with mystery, no small amount 
of adventure and, despite my strong physical and psychological attachment to the North, a distant, muted sense of 
ultimate home. As I draw primarily on landscape for creative impetus, during a trip to the region in 2007, I 
expected to find in the lands of my ancestors a potent new source of ideas. 
Although the vistas were arresting and beautiful, they did not resonate in me on a deep level. What I - a northerner 
by more than birth and temperament, it would seem - was allowed to carry away from that trip were merely fond 
recollections of a foreign place, profoundly "other" from my experience: the iconic, archetypal "Mother Sea" and 
its numberless shades of blue, the quality of the sunlight, the smell of flowers and herbs in the air. These are the 
impressions informing The wine-dark sea, a dreamlike postcard written after the fact, through a haze of memory. 
I could add to this a feeling of blissful honeymoon detachment. 

Matthew Whittall
Canadian-born composer Matthew Whittall (b. 1975) began his studies in Montreal. He earned degrees in performance and composition from Vanier College, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and SUNY Stony Brook, before settling in Finland in 2001. His output covers a wide variety of media, particularly orchestral, vocal, choral, chamber and solo instrumental works, but also features forays into electronics. His works have been commissioned and performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Finnish Radio Symphony and the Helsinki Chamber Choir, among others, and in festivals and radio broadcasts across Europe, North America and Japan. Whittall’s music is marked by an attempt to fuse its various disparate influences – Old and New World, Western and non-Western, sacred and secular, classical, folk and popular – into a single, variegated expressive language, and by a use of extramusical imagery ranging from natural phenomena to poetry and landscape art. Matthew Whittall currently lives in Helsinki. In addition to a busy schedule as a freelance composer, arranger, program annotator and internet blogger, he teaches music analysis, history and orchestration at the Sibelius Academy, where in 2013 he completed his doctoral work in composition, writing on the idea of nature in Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Whittall's works are available through the Finnish Music Information Center (FIMIC), Sulasol and the Uusinta Publishing Company, and are recorded on the Alba, Pilfink, Sony Classical and Centrediscs labels.

The Wine-dark Sea IV - Matthew Whittall

Pulsar for classical guitar - Juan José Eslava

Rody van Gemert - Guitar (Uwe Florath 2010)
Live at the Viitasaari Time of Music Festival 2014 / Finland

Guitar tuning: C#, A half#, D, G half b, B, E half#. (enabling 24 notes per octave)

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnPK6WHRPzU

Aesthetical presentation by the composer:

Pulsar, for solo guitar, is a part of a series of pieces dedicated to the exploration of the relation ship between gesture and musical writing. Through an ecological approach to sound, performer and instrumental virtuosism, Pulsar proposes a new lecture of rhythms produced by professional carpenters during the construction of wood houses in Japan, in a similar way of "Under Construction", for guitar and electronics, written during the previous months.
The author was not able to stop being sensible to the situation produced by that everyday activity: hitting the wood, without no intention to be listened, several persons in a curious, wonderful and (one can suppose) no conscious coordination of rhythmical complementarity and polyphony… In Pulsar, a reduced group of short original rhythms, are expanded in several complex constellations of durations, the rest of parameters (pitches, gestures…) modulating the degree of perceptual evidence of the coincidences, the regularities founded into the diversity of produced rhythmical sequences. 
"Pulsar" is also indebted to the close collaboration with guitarist Norio Sato and Rody van Gemert. It has been written on behalf of the Public University of Navarre (Spain). It is dedicated to the memory of Fernando Remacha, Spanish composer.

Score available at: http://www.unavarra.es/publicaciones/catalogo-de-publicaciones-y-compra?opcion=m-n&contentId=139205

Pulsar for classical guitar - Juan José Eslava

1st movement of Yoshihisa Taïra's - Pénombres I for 2 guitars and 12 strings. Rody van Gemert & Janne Malinen - guitars, Jyri Nissila - conductor, La Tempesta Orchestra
Live recording from the Sibelius Academy Concert Hall 10.11.2005
Guitars: Sumio Kurosawa 2005 & Kauko Liikanen/Uwe Florath 2003

Yoshihisa Taira (平 義久, 3 June 1937 in Tokyo – 13 March 2005 in Paris)
Taira studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts. He moved to France in 1966 and studied at the Conservatoire de Paris. Among his teachers were André Jolivet, Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen.

In 1971 he won the Prix Lili Boulanger, in 1974 the Grand Prix de Composition de la SACEM and in 1985 the Prix Florent Schmitt from the Académie des Beaux Arts. 
He was a composition lecturer at the École Normale de Musique in Paris.

Yoshihisa Taïra - Pénombres I for 2 guitars and 12 strings. First Movement

Yoshihisa Taïra - Pénombres I for 2 guitars and 12 strings. Second Movement

Ton de Leeuw - Concerto for two Guitars and 12 Strings
Rody van Gemert & Mikko Ikäheimo - guitars, Jyri Nissila - conductor, La Tempesta Orchestra
Live recording from the Sibelius Academy Concert Hall 10.11.2005
Guitars: Sumio Kurosawa 2005 & Paul Sheridan 2000

Ton de Leeuw was born on November 16, 1926 in Rotterdam. He died on May 31, 1996 in Paris (France).
In 1949, after some years of composition lessons with Henk Badings, he went to Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen (analysis) and Thomas de Hartmann (orchestration). His early interest for non-Western music brought him to Jaap Kunst and the ethnomusicology department at the Amsterdam University (1950-1954).
From 1954 to 1959 he was music director at the Dutch Radio Union. From 1959 to 1986 he was engaged with the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, first as composition teacher and head of the electronic studio, later serving as managing director. Additionally he was a scholar on 20th century music at the University of Amsterdam. From 1958 to 1976 he gave hundreds of radio readings relating to contemporary and non-western music. In 1961 Ton de Leeuw was commissioned by the government to travel to India to study art music. Since then he gave many readings, concerts and workshops on the East-West relationship in music, contemporary music and his own compositions all over the world. From 1988 he lived in France.
Altogether Ton de Leeuw wrote about 150 compositions. Important works are the radiophonic oratorio Job (1956), Mouvements rétrogrades (1957) for orchestra, Strijkkwartet nr. 1 (1958), Symphonies of winds (1963), the opera De droom (1963), Haiku II (1968) for mezzo-soprano and large ensemble, Music for strings (1970), Gending for gamelan ensemble (1975), Mountains (1977) for bass clarinet and tape, the electronic composition Clair obscur (1982), and a trilogy with: Car nos vignes sont en fleur for choir, And they shall reign for ever for mezzo-soprano and ensemble, and Invocations for mezzo-soprano, choir and ensemble (1981-1983). At the occasion of the centenary of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra De Leeuw wrote Résonances (1985) for orchestra. Among his later works are: Les adieux (1988) for piano, Danses sacrées (1990) for piano and orchestra, the opera Antigone (1991) and at last Three Shakespeare Songs (1994) for mezzo-soprano and ensemble.
Many of his papers on contemporary music and the relationship of East and West in music were published in international magazines and journals. The standard work Muziek van de twintigste eeuw (Music of the 20th Century) was published in 1964 and translated in English, Swedish and German.
In 1956 Ton de Leeuw was awarded the Prix Italia for Job, in 1958 the Prix des Jeunesses Musicales for Strijkkwartet and in 1982 the Matthijs Vermeulenprijs for Car nos vignes sont en fleur. Posthumous he was awarded the Matthijs Vermeulenprijs 1997 for Three Shakespeare songs.

Score available from Donemus: https://webshop.donemus.com/action/front/sheetmusic/3575/Concerto+pour+deux+guitares+et+douze+instruments+à+cordes

Rody van Gemert

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