After his latest recording, devoted to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas in his own arrangement, Franz Halász returns to Spanish music with this recital devoted to Federico Moreno Torroba. The composer of many of the best-known zarzuelas, Moreno Torroba did not initially seem destined to specialise in guitar music. It was his symphonic poems that caught the attention of the legendary guitarist Andrés Segovia, who commissioned Moreno Torroba’s first compositions for guitar despite the composer’s unfamiliarity with the instrument. The compositions gathered here showcase a composer who, although deeply rooted in the Spanish musical tradition, was attuned to what was being done elsewhere, including the music of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, and who created a personal language marked by impressionism that would later influence guitar music throughout the twentieth century, from Heitor Villa-Lobos to Leo Brouwer.

The winner of a Latin Grammy, Franz Halász is a highly acclaimed guitarist who has himself contributed to the repertoire of his instrument by making arrangements of Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz. On a guitar built in 1936 by the legendary luthier Hermann Hauser, Halász turns the instrument into a multi-faceted prism through which the musician can ‘break the light of music’ into orchestral sound, in the words of Segovia.