Aquarelle Guitar Quartet - Spirit of Brazil (2009)

The language of the guitar – huge, sometimes weird, vocabulary, and asymmetric, anti-pianistic grammar – is one that precious few big-name composers have remotely understood. Most good repertoire is by composer-guitarists. The burgeoning quartet genre offers great possibilities, but needs experienced writing and sharp ensemble to avoid sounding like jailer’s keys. So hooray: we get both in this instantly likeable tribute to the Brazilian sound. The highlight is Roland Dyens’s Brésils, which comprises of six attractive pieces that expertly utilise guitar colours while paying homage to rainforest birds, chôros-playing buskers, and the seductive sway of João Gilberto thrumming Jobim’s Girl from Ipanema. Villa-Lobos’s familiar floating ‘Aria’ may not sustain on even four guitars convincingly enough for everyone; but from composing father and daughter Sérgio and Clarice Assad come vibrant, sometimes rock-explosive, album-tracks that mix carnival with cool. More well-textured popular appeal comes from Egberto Gismonti (hear the wistfully lovely duet Memória e Fado) and Paulo Bellinati. With outstanding playing and infectious spirit, this is no mere niche guitar CD, but a luscious and lively general-appeal winner.

Review by Rob Ainsley, BBC Music Magazine

If, like me, you usually find anything more than two classical guitars a transgression of good taste and a guitar orchestra a complete abomination, this surprising new release from the Aquarelle Guitar Quartet will force you to revise your opinions.

Formed while its original members (of which two remain) were students at the Royal Northern College of Music, the AGQ is an award-winning ensemble that can easily stand alongside the likes of the excellent LA Guitar Quartet, whose 2007 release “LAGQ Brazil” (Telarc) perhaps inspired the younger quartet’s own “Spirit of Brazil” (it’s worth noting that the AGQ has received instruction from LA Guitar Quartet member Scott Tennant).

Whereas the LAGQ’s “Brazil” also features the talents of São Pauloborn jazz vocalist and composer Luciana Souza, flautist Katisse Buckingham and percussionist Kevin Ricard to bring some extra colour and variety to the mix, the AGQ goes it alone, imitating percussion instruments such as the quica where necessary and generally having a ball. Listen to the compelling groove in the vibrant opening Bluezilian by Clarice Assad, daughter of Sergio of Assad Brothers fame (who is also represented here with his evocative Uarekena), or the sensitive, improvisatory phrasing in the moving Gismonti duet Memória e Fado which ends the disc.

Then there are gems such as the successful arrangement of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No 5 by former Aquarelle member Richard Safhill, and the incredible six-movement Brésils by Roland Dyens, in which the AGQ manage convincingly to sound like an Amazonian rainforest and a marching band at the Carnival de Rio. Guitarquartetophobes – your cure has arrived!

Review by William Yeoman, Gramophone