Attuned to the timbre: in concert performances and recordings, Eduardo Fernandez explores the polyphonic potential of the versatile guitar.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

For nearly three decades Uruguayan guitarist Eduardo Fernandez has enjoyed a reputation as one of the great masters of his instrument. He has performed hundreds of concerts throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has recorded more than thirty LPs and CDs, in addition to a recent DVD. His vast repertoire includes the canonic works for the guitar, as well as obscure gems discovered through patient research. Concerts and recordings often include his own transcriptions of familiar compositions written for other instruments, most notably a recent compact disc of J. S. Bach's suites for the lute, which several guitar journals nominated for "recording of the year." As a composer he has written a substantial quantity of chamber music, choral works, and pieces for the guitar. In recent years, he has also taught seminars and master classes at the University of Montevideo, directed a summer guitar festival in Germany, and published a book, Technique, Mechanism, Learning: An Investigation into Becoming a Guitarist, now available in several languages.

Quiet and self-effacing, Fernandez lives modestly with his composer wife, Ana Torres, in the El Cordon area of downtown Montevideo.

He attributes much of his formation as a musician to his four years of study with the Uruguayan master Abel Carlevaro, who excelled as both a performer and an influential teacher of students from all over the world. Carlevaro had been a student of Andres Segovia, but early in his career he began to question showy virtuosity and instead started formulating an alternative approach based on musical solidity and precise technique, with particular attention to the ergonomics of playing the instrument. Fernandez, who had studied with the guitarist-composer Hector Tosar and later the Italian conductor Guido Santorsola, persuaded Carlevaro to take him on as a student.

"I was sixteen or seventeen at the time," Fernandez recalls. "He obliged me to rethink my technique and my entire approach to playing the guitar. With immense gentleness he showed me little by little that I really didn't know anything about playing the instrument, but with equal patience he helped me build a new technique. He also had a very inquiring mind. He was never satisfied with an answer on first sight. He would say, 'Playing is not as important as thinking. Play one hour but think ten.' Whereas many guitarists focus on what the fingers can do, his was a holistic approach that considered the hand, wrist, am:, and body, also how best to sit down and hold the instrument to make the guitar accommodate the body instead of the other way around. For him the fingers were only 'the final actors.' He never imposed anything on authority and was willing to spend hours discussing interpretative options. He was always willing to listen to new ideas. Like all great teachers, he learned a lot from his own students."

As a young man, Fernandez studied economics at the university but before long decided upon a career in music. "At first I started worrying about performance. When I was twenty and I went on stage, I worried about 'blowing them away' which, for the guitar, means lots of speed, volume, passion, and fancy embellishments." But as he...