During the nineteenth century Franz Liszt was the greatest exponent of the transcription - he used the piano to help popularise orchestral and vocal music whose performance would have otherwise been confined to places and venues where there were orchestras and musicians able to present the music as written. Another instrument whose range and flexibility made it an admirable vehicle for transcriptions of all kind of music was the guitar - one that Liszt unfortunately never turned his hand to - and during the nineteenth century people such as Anton Diabelli, the Bohemian virtuoso Johann Casper Mertz, and the Spaniard...  Read More »

The guitar is not, perhaps, an instrument that you think of as devotional, adapted to what you do in a church. In fact, however, the delicacy and subtlety of this string instrument sits very comfortably in a fairly small church, especially one with such architectural and historic beauty as Old St Paul's. The guitar, after all is a close relative of the lute and its keyed descendants such as the clavichord, harpsichord or spinet. To its disadvantage is the relatively small repertoire of music of more than a century old, and the dominance of much of its recent repertoire by Hispanic...  Read More »