Tohi Harada  Sunday 22nd March 2026

Programme

Fancy No.5 by John Dowland (1563-1626)
Fantasia P.1 by John Dowland (1563-1626)
Les Bergeries by Francois Couperin (1668-1733)
Les Sauvages by Jean-Philippe Rameu (1683-1764)
Gigue and Gavotte (in A minor Suite) by Manuel Ponce (1882-1948)
Children’s Album Op.39 I, V,VI,VII by Pyotr llyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Peer Gynt Suite No.1 Morning Mood by Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
La Gran Sarabanda by Leo Brouwer (b.1939)

~ Interval ~

Invocación y Danza by Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999)
Cataluña from Suite Española op.47 by Issac Albeniz (1860-1909)
Cavatina by Stanley Myers (1930-1993)
Estrellita by Manuel Maria Ponce (1882-1948)
Hymne A L’Amour by Marguerite Monnot (1903-1961)
Capriccio Diabolico (Omaggio A Paganini) Op.85 by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968)
Triaela III.Clown Down by Roland Dyens (1955-2016)


This afternoon’s programme presents a wonderful assortment of smaller works. It could be envisioned as a carefully crafted box of hand-made chocolates, morsels of delight in various sizes and musical flavours. The prize-winning Japanese guitarist Tohi Harada will be our guide on this journey spanning over 500 years of musical innovation.
        We begin with two works originally for lute by the eminent lutenist and composer John Dowland. Although Dowland was considered a cheerful individual, a sense of melancholic longing pervades his music. This is evident in the two fantasies that open our concert. Whether called by the English term ‘fancy’ or the Italian ‘fantasia’, these are works that are meant to sound improvisatory and explore the aural realms of the human imagination. In order to sound spontaneous, a great deal of compositional planning must go into their creation.
        Next come two pieces from the French Baroque, both of which were originally for harpsichord. The harpsichord, like the guitar, is a plucked string instrument (though the harpsichord has a keyboard and a mechanism whereby the string is plucked). The shared means of creating sounds makes these sorts of transcriptions especially effective. The French, unlike the Germans or Italians, liked to give descriptive titles to their short keyboard pieces. Francois Couperin’s ‘Les Bergeries’ (The Sheepfolds) is stately and elegant, while Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ‘Les Sauvages’ (The Savages) is filled with decorative ornaments that enhance its nimble qualities. Rameau recycled ‘Les Sauvages’, with added vocal parts, for the fourth and final scene in the second version of his opera-ballet Les Indes galante (1736), which depicted stories of love in parts of the world far from Europe. ‘Les Sauvages’ underscored the story of a Spaniard and a Frenchman who romantically pursue the same North American indigenous woman.
        We move to Mexico in the early twentieth century with two movements from Manuel Ponce’s Suite in A minor. In 1929, the famed Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia asked Ponce to create a piece in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach and pass it off as coming from the eighteenth century. Segovia even persuaded the composer to write under the German surname ‘Weiss’ as part of the prank. Segovia wanted to play a joke on the guitar world (and on the public) by convincing them that the ‘new’ work they were about to hear was written 150 years earlier and had just recently been discovered. (The violinist Fritz Kreisler was doing something similar with several of his most popular recital pieces, confessing to the hoax in 1935.) Thus, Ponce’s Suite sounds much more like music from the 1700s than the late 1920s. We’ll hear two movements today, a stately gavotte and an energetic gigue. As pieces written for Segovia, both require formidable technique.
        The Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album from 1878 consists of 24 short pieces for and about children. Adults, however, can also savour the fine quality of these miniatures. Today we’ll hear four movements from Tchaikovsky’s evocative collection: the gentle ‘Morning Prayer’ (no. 1); the playful ‘March of the Wooden Soldiers’ (no. 5); the melancholic ‘The Sick Doll’ (no. 6) and the slow funeral march, with echoes of Beethoven and Chopin, ‘The Doll’s Funeral’ (no. 7).
        Going from Russia to Norway, Edvard Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’ comes from the music he wrote to accompany Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt. The play chronicles the adventures of its title character as he travels from Norway to North Africa and back. ‘Morning Mood’ is a musical depiction of the sun rising over the expansive North African desert. Its subtle array of timbral colours capture the glow of the sand-infused sky.
        The first half concludes with La Gran Sarabanda by the distinguished Cuban guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer. Written in 2018, the organically expansive set of variations showcases the two fundamental characteristics in Brouwer’s work: a clear respect for past traditions and a spirit of the present. For La Gran Sarabanda, Brouwer employs the centuries-old sarabande, a dance with Latin American origins, to explore a variety of musical techniques and moods in a truly grand style.
        Beginning the second half is Spanish composer and pianist Joaquin Rodrigo’s Invocación y danza: Hommage a Manuel de Falla (Invocation and Dance: Homage to Manuel de Falla) from 1961. Blind from the age of three, Rodrigo notated his compositions in Braille and had them transcribed into standard musical script. In his homage, Rodrigo includes quotes from some of the earlier Spanish composer’s most famous works, including Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy (The Tomb of Claude Debussy, de Falla’s only work for solo guitar), El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) and El Amor Brujo (The Witch’s Love). The overall atmosphere is more subdued than the stereotyped musical evocations of ‘sunny Spain’ one might expect. ‘Invocation’ is rhapsodic, almost improvisatory in spirit, while the interwoven melodic lines and repeated notes of ‘Danza’ imbue it with a sense of elegance and grace.
        Next comes a transcription of one of Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz’s most popular pieces, Cataluña. The second movement of his Suite Española for solo piano, it was written in 1899 and dedicated to his mother. A gentle, swaying motion permeates the piece, which is in the form of a corranda. The corranda is a traditional dance from Catalonia related to the French courante (a running dance) that originally included singing.
        The lyrical sublimity of Stanley Myers’ Cavatina has made it among the most popular gems in the classical guitar repertoire. Myers based it on a short musical idea he had written for the soundtrack of the film The Walking Stick (1970). The English guitarist John Williams suggested that Myers expand it into a full piece, which the composer did. Williams recorded the result, Cavatina, the following year. The origins of Cavatina in film music came full circle when director Michael Cimino chose to feature it in his 1978 Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter, a decision that catapulted the work to immense popularity.
        Another delightful miniature is Estrellita (Little Star) by the eminent Mexican composer Manuel Ponce, whose music we heard in the first half of today’s concert. Ponce was famous for connecting the concert hall with Mexican folk traditions. In his song Estrellita (1912), for which he also wrote the lyrics, a young woman tells a star that without the love of her beloved she will die. The woman begs the star to come down from the sky and tell her if he loves her, even just a little. Ponce’s gentle, folk-like melody and serene mood have made the song popular in various instrumental versions, including the one violinist Jascha Heifitz performed in the 1939 film They Shall Have Music.
        This theme of love continues in Marguerite Monnot’s hauntingly beautiful Hymne à l’amour (Hymn to Love). The glorious French singer Édith Piaf wrote the words as a heartfelt letter to her lover, the French boxer Marcel Cerdan, after his tragic death on 28 October 1949. Cerdan was flying from Paris to New York to visit Piaf when his plane crashed. Piaf recorded the song in 1950, after which it became a standard in the French vocal repertoire and quickly achieved worldwide fame. Hymne à l’amour has famously been featured in two Olympic Games ceremonies, the closing of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (in 2021) and the opening of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, where Celine Dion’s heart-wrenching performance remains etched in our collective cultural memory.
        The Italian-American composer and pianist Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco established himself as one of the most prolific creators of music for guitar during the twentieth century. Much of this had to do with his friendship with Segovia. It was Segovia who commissioned Castelnuovo-Tedesco to write the Capriccio Diabolico in 1935 as a tribute to the early nineteenth-century violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini. Dazzling virtuosity and a sense of improvisatory flair suffuses the nine-minute tour-de-force. As often the case, the performer, in this case Segovia, wasn’t entirely pleased with the new work he’d asked for. The guitarist took it upon himself to make some changes, removing some sections and adding others. It is Segovia’s revised version that we’ll hear this afternoon.
        Concluding the programme is the cleverly titled ‘Clown Down’, a brilliant showpiece by the French virtuoso guitarist and composer Roland Dyens. Considered one of the finest guitarists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Dyens was especially known for his gifts of improvisation, his spellbinding performances and his generous, at times unpredictable personality. These qualities are all evident in ‘Clown Down’, the final movement of his suite Triaela, written in 2001 and 2002. ‘Clown Down’ is a tribute to the Brazilian pianist and guitarist Egberto Gismonti, who was fascinated by guitars with extra bass strings. Hence, for ‘Clown Down’, Dyens requires the guitarist to tune the lowest string from an E down to an A. In addition to sections featuring a persistently repeated low ‘A’ string, Dynes calls for various extended techniques from the guitarist, including harmonics (touching the string with the left hand rather than firmly placing the fingers on the fretboard) and right-hand slaps. Its effusiveness, joy and virtuosity provide a splendid conclusion to an afternoon of musical delicacies.

Born in Japan, Tohi Harada is quickly emerging as one of the most exciting and dynamic guitarists of his generation. Tohi began playing the guitar when he was just three, and along with winning junior guitar competitions in Japan, he was also volunteering and performing in various care homes. His debut solo concert in 2021, on which he performed a transcription of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, was broadcast on Japanese national television. Since then, he has won major international competitions and is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music. Tohi’s appearance this afternoon is supported by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust.

-Notes by William Everett