Sonograma CD review, released on 29.9.2018

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The record label JSM Guitar Records, linked to the classical guitar, presents Phasma the new album of the Cologne Guitar Quartet. The sound engineer Javier Salvador has done a magnificent job with these works of world music and not lacking in feeling: Feliu Gasull, Georg Friedrich Haas and Mayako Kubo.
With this wonderful quartet formed by Henrique Almeida, Tal Botvinik, Ptolemaios Armaos and Tobias Juchem, music regains all its superiority.
It is an avant-garde work with excellent complex compositional ideas and very well interpreted. Four guitarists whose insurance, which never seems to waver, and confidence permeate intensity in the complex compositional structures.
The Catalan singer Assumpta Mateu, singing and Lied teacher at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, has called us a lot of attention, not only for the quality of her voice -which shudders- but also for the warm interpretation of the “Fantasia sobre dos temas de Manuel de Falla” by Feliu Gasull. Mateu is one of the mainstays of this relationship between contemporary music and Jondo art, the most genuine Andalusian cante.
In the piece “Atem Pause” by the Japanese pianist and composer Mayako Kubo, the quartet's strength reappears with voices, percussions on the wood of the guitar, which, as a dialogue, reveals an eclecticism that allows the composer to accommodate a free and plural compositional style.
The quartet for four guitars by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, uses different tunings based on the harmonics of the note D (Ré).
In Phasma, the Cologne Guitar Quartet has managed to build a true and delicious musical universe in a contemporary language.