Thomas Viloteau Plays Music of Memory by Maw

French guitarist Thomas Viloteau plays Music of Memory by British composer Nicholas Maw (1935–2009). One of the great works of the period (1989, rev. 1991), Viloteau pulls it off beautifully. Pretty nice sound too despite it’s just a small room. You can get the sheet music via Amazon: Music of Memory by Maw. Viloteau has a big write up which you can read under his Youtube video, this is only a small excerpt: “Following Britten’s lead, Maw chose to work on a large set of variations—or ‘meditations’ as he called them in the score’s preface—based on a theme by Mendelssohn. The theme was not chosen at random and fits his nostalgia for the past. In fact, he took as his source material the first two phrases of the Intermezzo from Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13…which can perhaps be linked to the subject of the Fugue in C major BWV 1005 by Bach, especially in its transposed version to A minor… Britten is known to have told Bream that De Falla’s Homenaje was like 20 minutes of music jammed into a 2 page miniature. I’ll take the same approach and state that the Music of Memory is like 200 minutes of music jammed into 23 pages… it will not reveal its depth upon the first hearing, but its beauty will keep growing the more one listens to it and studies it. Like with any masterpiece, the journey is worth every second of it.”