Abel Carlevaro. A New World for the Guitar

Abel Carlevaro (1916-2001) —excellent and singular Uruguayan performer, pedagogue and composer—indelibly marked the second half of the twentieth century in the so-called classical guitar universe. In the pages of this book, Alfredo Escande covers the more than eighty years of Carlevaro's life and studies in depth the set of characters and cultural events whose influence he assimilated in the framework of his native Montevideo, and which then turned back to his musical and pedagogical creation, dressing it with their special imprint. Andrés Segovia and the popular Uruguayan guitarists, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Agustín Barrios' influence, Maurice Ohana and the painters of Taller Torres García, the Spanish poets and "Bachicha" Gallotti, Bach scores and Gardel records, a special family environment and cultural traditions inherited from the European past, all of them are the ingredients that Carlevaro is melting in the effervescent crucible of the Montevidean atmosphere of the '30s and '40s to then —in a brilliant artistic and teaching career of more than six decades— turn over, from the South, the map of the guitar of his century.