This is great piece and of super interest in terms of early chamber music and concertos with guitar. Above is Runar Kjeldsberg playing Concerto for Guitar and Strings by B. Vidal (d. 1800). This comes via his great YouTube channel. As he says on YouTube ” The earliest guitar concerto. Published in Paris in 1793. Possibly written earlier, but publication might have been delayed due to the french revolution. This is the first movement of two.” Runar Kjeldsberg is playing on an original Gennaro Fabricatore 1830 guitar and is joined by Stefan Lindvall (violin), Laima Olsson (violin) Anna Gärtner (viola), and Gunnar Hauge (cello).
Sheet Music: B. Vidal Concerto for Guitar and Strings. This is Stanley Yates’ edition of the concerto via Amazon. Yates has been doing some great editions of lesser-known works these days so bonus points to him. His promo text: “Written by Spanish guitarist B. Vidal and originally published in Paris in ca. 1793, this two-movement work is typical of the galant cosmopolitan concertos of 1770s and 1780s Paris. May be performed with string orchestra or as a chamber concerto (with string quartet).”
B. Vidal – Spanish Guitarist and Composer (via Yates)
“B. Vidal (d. 1800) — we do not know his first name beyond the initial — was a Spanish guitarist active in Paris during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.3 The scant biographical details we know of him come almost entirely from brief entries found in the nineteenth-century dictionary of François-Joseph Fétis and the account of Parisian publishing activity complied by Anik Devriès and François Lesure… Vidal’s guitar concerto, a two-movement work in D-major, was advertised for sale in 1793, some
ten years before the next known guitar concerto, a work by Antoine Lhoyer published in Hamburg in 1802. The Vidal concerto is, therefore, the only surviving example of the genre from the eighteenth century, and the earliest known concerto for the guitar.”From this article by Stanley Yates via his Classical Guitar Study library page: “Three Early Guitar Concertos (the Earliest-Known Guitar Concerto and Two Others) from Late Eighteenth/Early Nineteenth-Century Paris: Vidal, Doisy and Doisy-Viotti,” Soundboard: Journal of the Guitar Foundation of America (Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, 2010, pp. 6-11). READ IT HERE
