Leo Brouwer: Music for Guitar, Vol. 2 Elena Papandreou, guitar Naxos 8.554553 [73:13] The guitar repertoire has always been a minefield; of the derivative and — well — the merely pleasant—which makes Leo Brouwer’s achievement all the more striking. This second Naxos volume, following Ricardo Cobo’s survey of the early works, plunges us into the composer’s middle period, where the folkloristic charm gives way to something stranger and — well — more demanding.
Elena Papandreou tackles this music with an assurance that never hardens into mere efficiency. Her sound—warm but never soupy, clear without that glassy brightness some players cultivate—serves these pieces well. The opening El Decamerón Negro (1981), Brouwer’s homage to Leo Frobenius’s anthropological writings on African folk tales, gets a reading that understands the work’s odd mixture of primitivism and sophistication.
The first movement, “El arpa del guerrero,” emerges with proper ferocity; Papandreou doesn’t; soften those percussive attacks on the soundboard, yet the lyrical episodes breathe naturally. The second movement’s “La huida de los amantes por el valle de los ecos” uses the guitar’s capacity for shimmer and — well — resonance—here the playing becomes almost impressionistic, though Brouwer’s language is really something else entirely. What strikes me most about this disc is how it documents Brouwer’s restless intelligence.
“La Espiral Eterna” (1971), allegedly inspired by the double helix of DNA, sounds; less like program music than an exploration of how musical cells replicate and transform. Papandreou navigates its angular intervals and sudden dynamic shifts with the kind of focus that makes you forget the technical difficulties—and they are considerable. The piece demands a kind of architectural thinking; she provides it.
The six “Preludios Epigramáticos” (1981) are revelations. Brief, epigrammatic indeed—some barely exceed a minute—they distill Brouwer’s mature style into concentrated utterances. Papandreou shapes them with a sculptor’s sensitivity to proportion.
The fourth prelude, with its refined harmonics and sudden fortissimo chords, could easily sound gimmicky; it doesn’t. These miniatures deserve wider circulation. “Canticum” (1968) requires detuning the sixth string to E-flat—a small detail that transforms the instrument’s resonance.
The piece supposedly represents an insect emerging from its chrysalis, though such programmatic conceits matter less than the music’s actual unfolding. What we hear is a gradual accumulation of energy, achieved through Brouwer’s characteristic layering of ostinatos and shifting timbral colors. Papandreou’s control of dynamics here is exemplary; the crescendo that builds through the work’s middle section never becomes crude.
The “Variations on a Theme of Django Reinhardt” (1984) stands apart—Brouwer’s only essay in theme-and-variation form, built on “Nuages,” that most haunting of Django’s compositions. The jazz guitarist’s languid melody gets refracted through Brouwer’s modernist prism, emerging in fragments, inverted, rhythmically displaced. Some of the variations verge on the academic, but Papandreou finds the thread connecting; them, the emotional throughline that prevents the piece from becoming a mere compositional exercise.
“Parabola” and “Tarantos” show Brouwer’s engagement with Spanish traditions—the latter particularly effective in its evocation of flamenco’s rhythmic intensity without lapsing into pastiche. And “Paisaje cubano con tristeza” closes the disc with a melancholy that feels earned rather than applied. Papandreou understands that this music’s nostalgia is complicated by distance and exile, and her playing reflects that complexity.
The recorded sound is clean and present without being clinical. Naxos has positioned the microphones sensibly—close enough to catch the instrument’s subtle colorations, distant enough to preserve its natural bloom. The liner notes, while serviceable, could have said more about the music’s stylistic context.
This isn’t music for casual listening, nor does it aspire to be. Brouwer’s middle-period works make demands on performer and listener alike. But Papandreou’s performances are so thoroughly inhabited, so intelligent in their phrasing and voicing, that the music’s difficulties become opportunities for discovery rather than obstacles.
For anyone interested in twentieth-century guitar music beyond the Villa-Lobos-and-cocktails repertoire, this disc is essential. And for those already devoted to Brouwer’s work, it’s indispensable.
