Actually, two maestros here: the player, my friend Kevin Gallagher, and the composer, Francisco Tarrega, whose spirit seems to be inhabiting Kevin’s own for the duration of this intimate, heartfelt kitchen-table performance. It’s as though someone had snuck a video camera into the master’s candle-lit studio in nineteenth-century Madrid:
Listen to the richness and variety of Gallagher’s tone, and then zoom in and watch carefully to see if you can figure out what his right hand is doing to achieve this: subtle differences in hand use (the result of years of refinement and practice) make huge but always appropriate differences in how he is able to create a palette of sounds that shape the melody’s arc and give each chord meaning–and even character–without ever losing grasp of Tarrega’s shapely musical story-telling.
Almost in the same spirit, here’s a sketch I did of Tarrega, from many years ago:
Hint: look at what he’s using as a footstool….
