Sea Between the Lands

Salvatore Foderà is a Neapolitan-born guitarist who completed his studies in 2011 and embarked on a professional career performing across Asia, Europe and the Americas, including a tour of Chile sponsored by the Swiss government. His interest in Flamenco music led him to visit the Fundación Cristina Heeren in Seville and study with flamenco guitarist Pedro Sierra. This experience inspired Salvatore Foderà to create 'The Sea Between the Lands', which celebrates five centuries of Mediterranean music from Italy and Spain. As his debut album, it announces a lavishly gifted new presence on the European guitar scene, one whose innate musicianship and lively intelligence has already produced programmes acclaimed by the public and critical press alike. Salvatore Foderà begins his journey in with a fresh and folk-like Calata alla spagnola by Joan Ambrosio Dalza, the composer and arranger of Ottaviano Petrucci's Fourth Book of lute tablatures and arrangements, which is better known under the name of it's publisher. Already here we may appreciate the cultural traffic across the two major nations of the southern Mediterranean, whereby not only musicians but their cultures travel from one to the other, become absorbed and soak into their new homes. One such musician was Alonso Mudarra, born in Spain but who travelled to Italy as part of Charles V's court before settling in Seville. Salvatore Foderà's fellow Neapolitan Domenico Scarlatti undertook the reverse journey, and he is represented here by an arrangement for guitar of the very first in Kirkpatrick's catalogue of his 555 keyboard sonatas. Giuliani, Tárrega and Falla accompany us through the Romantic era in pieces that show how embedded the guitar culture had become in both countries, with Italian harmonies exercising a decisive influence over the native Spanish technique of playing. To conclude, Salvatore Foderà presents three pieces by 20th-century composers.