Date/Time
Date(s) - 19/07/2026
15:00 - 16:00
Location
Emäsalo Chapel
Guitar music by Donato d´Antonio
Free entry – program for sale / Fritt inträde med programförsäljning / Vapaa pääsy ohjelmamyynnillä
Programme
Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992)
Hommage à Liège — Introducción (1984) 2’00”
Ralph Towner (1940)
Haunted
Chick Corea (1941–2021)
Children’s Song No. 1 (1984)
John Cage (1912–1992)
In a Landscape (1948)
Tan Dun (1957)
Seven Desires for Guitar (2002)
Nicolò Paganini (1782–1840)
Romanza dalla Grande Sonata in A major
Enrique Granados (1867–1916)
Danza Andaluza · Danza Oriental
Manuel de Falla (1876–1946)
Homenaje pour le Tombeau de Claude Debussy (1920)
Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909)
Rumores de la Caleta, Op. 71 No. 6
Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992) — Hommage à Liège, Introducción (1984)
Piazzolla composed Hommage à Liège in 1984 for a guitar competition held in the Belgian city. Its opening movement, the Introducción, sets the tone for the entire evening: brooding, nocturnal, charged with an unresolved longing. Piazzolla spent his life forging a music that was neither purely tango nor purely concert music but something irreducibly itself — a sound born of Buenos Aires street corners and reborn in the concert hall. The Introducción is a compressed statement of that genius: a few gestures, a handful of measures, and already the air in the room has changed.
Ralph Towner (1940) — Haunted
Ralph Towner stands at a rare crossroads: equally fluent in jazz improvisation and European chamber aesthetics, he brought to the classical guitar a sensibility shaped as much by Bill Evans and Miles Davis as by the European art-song tradition. Haunted is among his most inward pieces — a slow, searching meditation in which silence and ambiguity carry as much weight as sound. Its harmonies hover between major and minor without settling, like a question that declines to be answered. It is the kind of music that seems to have always existed, waiting to be found.
Chick Corea (1941–2021) — Children’s Song No. 1 (1984)
Between 1971 and 1980 Chick Corea composed twenty Children’s Songs — not pieces for children, exactly, but gifts for the child that persists in every listener. The first, and simplest, is built on a gently rocking figure of almost disarming naivety. In D’Antonio’s transcription it glows on the guitar with the warmth of a folk lullaby. Corea believed music could reach the heart without mediation or irony; this tiny piece is his most eloquent proof of that faith.
John Cage (1912–1992) — In a Landscape (1948)
John Cage is remembered above all as a philosopher of silence and chance — the composer who placed a pianist before an unopened instrument and called it music. But In a Landscape, composed in 1948 for the dancer Louise Lippold, reveals an entirely different face. It is music of spacious, unhurried beauty: a long, slowly unfolding melody above a repeated pedal, moving through time with the patience of water finding its level. Cage wrote it before the radical experiments that would make him famous, and it carries no manifesto, no provocation — only sound, carefully tended. On the guitar it acquires an intimacy and fragility that few instruments could match.
Tan Dun (1957) — Seven Desires for Guitar (2002)
Born in Hunan province and shaped by Chinese folk music, Beijing opera, and the conservatories of New York, Tan Dun has devoted his career to dissolving the boundaries between East and West, ancient and modern, the sacred and the sensory. Seven Desires was commissioned by guitarist Sharon Isbin and stands today as one of the most significant solo guitar works of our time. Its title invokes seven fundamental human states — passion, anger, grief, fear, love, hatred, and longing — and each of its seven short movements embodies one of these states with direct, sometimes overwhelming force.
The music moves fluidly between Chinese folk melody, Zen ritual, and Western modernism. Extended techniques — harmonics, percussive tapping, sounds drawn from the instrument’s body — evoke the timbre of temple bells, ancient lithophones, and the erhu. It is, in the deepest sense, music about time: about what endures when cultures collide and when they quietly listen to one another.
Nicolò Paganini (1782–1840) — Romanza dalla Grande Sonata in A major
History knows Paganini as the demonic virtuoso of the violin — the musician whose technique seemed to defy physical possibility. Less well known is the Paganini who composed privately for guitar, the instrument he called his truest companion: the one on which he could think aloud without an audience watching. The Romanza from the Grande Sonata reveals a composer entirely different from the public legend. Its long, singing melody has the directness of Italian bel canto — unhurried, tender, and without a trace of showmanship. It is music that simply wants to be heard.
Enrique Granados (1867–1916) — Danza Andaluza · Danza Oriental
Granados composed his Twelve Spanish Dances in the 1890s, and they remain among the most natural-sounding music ever written for a keyboard instrument that was, in spirit, always dreaming of the guitar. The Danza Andaluza (No. 5) is deeply felt and modal, its strummed bass a barely disguised guitar accompaniment; the Danza Oriental (No. 2) is more inward, its sinuous melody carrying traces of the Arab-Andalusian heritage that lies just beneath the surface of so much Spanish art music. Played on the guitar itself, both pieces feel not transcribed but returned to where they began.
Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) — Homenaje pour le Tombeau de Claude Debussy (1920)
When Debussy died in March 1918, La Revue musicale invited composers to contribute short elegies. Falla’s contribution — composed for guitar at the suggestion of Miguel Llobet — is a masterpiece of compression. In barely three and a half minutes it distils an entire world: the habanera rhythm that Debussy had loved, transformed here into something elusive and elegiac; harmonies that seem to hover just out of reach; a final gesture of perfect stillness. Donato D’Antonio devoted his Master’s thesis to this work, and in his performance one hears both the depth of that scholarly intimacy and the urgency of a musician for whom the music is anything but academic.
Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) — Rumores de la Caleta, Op. 71 No. 6
The title means ‘Murmurs of the Caleta’ — the fishing beach near Málaga where, on warm evenings, one might hear the sound of guitars, voices, and the slow movement of the sea. Albéniz composed this piece for piano but heard it, unmistakably, on the guitar: its opening bars evoke a player tuning and strumming, its central section unfolds a malagueña of irresistible rhythmic drive, and its close dissolves back into warmth and the sound of water. It brings this evening to a close not with a flourish but with something rarer — the feeling that the music has been a place one could actually live in, if only for a moment.