El Manisero – CARLOS BARBOSA-LIMA & JOHANNES TONIO KREUSCH

Description

Carlos Barbosa-Lima – guitar
Johannes Tonio Kreusch – guitar
Special guest: Cornelius Claudio Kreusch – piano

For too long, music in Germany has been pigeonholed. In serious and light music, in composed classical music and improvised jazz, in all kinds of Anglicisms from traditional-roots-music to modern-contemporary-avantgarde. The acoustic guitar often enough fell through the cracks and ended up in its own niche, a parallel world of organizers. All this is the only possible explanation for the fact that the 76-year-old Carlos Barbosa-Lima is still hardly known in this country. After all, he is not someone who would have served the pigeonholes, but a man who is a legend not only in the musica popu-leira of his native Brazil, but also in the Latin jazz of North America and in the worldwide gi-tarrist scene. He was considered a child prodigy in his hometown of Sao Paulo as early as the 1950s, made his debut at the age of 13, left for the world at 16, worked in Spain with the giant of classical guitar Andrés Segovia and later in New York – for a long time his “home base” – with Antonio Carlos Jobim, the inventor of bossa nova. Who has recorded more than 100 albums to date, in various genres, but always marked by his own unique, Brazilian-based style. And who has given concerts in the most important halls in the world, for example at the age of 21 for the first time in Carnegie Hall.

The perfect opportunity to get to know Carlos Barbosa-Lima is his first album for GLM, “El Manisero”. Not only is his unmistakable playing on the strings to be discovered, which is based on rhythm and melody as equally as with few other guitarists and always surprises with unusual harmonic turns or contrapuntal, polyphonic extensions (with correspondingly extravagant fingerings). One of the most gifted and influential arrangers also appears here. With more than a thousand transcriptions and arrangements, Carlos Barbosa-Lima has enriched the guitar repertoire in a unique way, inspiring many great composers to write works for the guitar. Here he demonstrates this mastery on the one hand in his very own field: in a walk through the cosmos of world-famous Latin American pieces. And on the other hand with the fact that he has arranged them all new and especially for a guitar duet with his friend Johannes Tonio Kreusch.

Kreusch, himself a recognized figure on the classical guitar scene, is admittedly much more than just a musical duet partner here. While studying at the Juilliard School in New York, he gained crucial insight into Latin American music with Barbosa-Lima and became one of its important interpreters himself. Even his debut astounded with a revolutionary Heitor Villa-Lobos recording – just reissued – that remains a landmark for its accuracy and Kreusch’s empathy for his musical imagination. For a long time now, Kreusch has also been working with composers such as the Cuban Tullio Peramo Cabrera and the Argentine Maximo Diego Pujol, who write pieces to suit him.