PRODUKTBESCHREIBUNGEN
This album is the fifth volume of the complete recording of Napoléon Coste’s guitar works, interpreted by Carlo Fierens performing on a guitar by René Lacôte (1855). His music displays a wide spectrum of characteristics of the Romantic style. The theme and variation genre aside, Coste chooses to continue the composition with new musical ideas, or varied repetitions of them, which gives his works an episodic or rhapsodic trait. Over time, his works show more and more characteristics typical of Romanticism; indeed, there is an alternating tide of periods displaying more or less intense Romantic features. The works with a lighter Romantic imprint are normally those clearly intended for either commercial or didactic purposes. The works included in this volume, titled “Souvenirs”, span a timeframe of more than forty years, and yet they underline Coste’s consistency in style and writing. This selection of small, simple pieces from three different collections (op. 5, op. 7, and op. 51) is a good example of the composer’s dealing with short form. It is also a display of intertextuality as one late piece is entirely modeled on youthful works published forty years earlier.