Alberto Ponce - Maurice Ohana - Œuvres de guitare (2020)

Obviously, Alberto Ponce was initiated at length into the most secret intentions of works and of their author. He was thus able, at the same time, to make them more striking and to assign to them the limits that could be tempted to overcome by performers more attentive to the external effects than to the multiple and deep spectrum of these works. Maurice Ohana who has an atavistic complicity with the guitar that, without practicing it himself, has been able to grasp all of its ancestral tricks, to tame its whims, to set aside the facilities that harm his nobility: he wants it sober and incisive, with the sharpness of the gradations, from black to white, as in the Goyesque etchings whose memory more or less haunts all his creative thought, and whose titles here openly confirm it. / lt is obvious that Ponce has, for many years, now, been intimately associated with the most secret intentions of these works and their composer. lt is for this reason that he has been able both to interpret these pieces with the maximum effect, and at the same time to assign limits to them which certain interpreters, more concerned with external effects than with the multiple and profound inner spectrum of this usic , might be tempted to exceed. It exists, between Maurice Ohana and the guitar, a kind of atavistic complicity, and the fact that, though he does not play it himself, he has been able to penetrate all its ancestral cunning, master its caprices and dispense with all the easy effects which detract from its nobility. He wishes to stress its sober and incisive qualities, and the clarity of its color spectrum containing every shade from black to white as in those etchings of Goya, which have had an obsessive influence on almost all his creative thought as is apparent here from the titles he has chosen for these pieces.