Blue Guitar – Stein-Erik Olsen

Guitar music from the cold North

Guitarists are by no means alone in playing arrangements of music originally written for other media, but they have perhaps made much more use of them than have players of other instruments; this had helped to create the impression that the guitar lacks original repertory – and to conceal the fact that this is not true. There is also a popular belief that the “natural home” of the guitar is in the Hispanic countries, where “romance” and sunshine abound, but the guitar now belongs equally to the colder North, not least to Norway. On the album “Blue Sonata”, guitarist Stein-Erik Olsen performs the astonishingly beautiful works written specifically for the guitar by John W. Duarte, Johan Kvandal, Antonio Bibalo and Benjamin Britten – works that evoke genres and moods spanning from jazz and dodecaphony, to folk and renaissance music. The guitarist himself made his highly acclaimed debut at London´s Wigmore Hall, a concert that made him a much sought after soloist and won him unreserved admiration amongst his peers.