Global artist has key to pulling Kiwis' strings

Gunter Herbig's new collection of New Zealand guitar music fills a real gap in the local catalogue. Focusing on music by Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar, this album has the potential to introduce the music of these composers to punters who might not be so tempted to take on their symphonies.

Lilburn's Seventeen Pieces, written when the composer was being drawn away from acoustic composition, are fascinating vignettes. Some are expansive and lyrical, with passing strums of Spain in their strings; others are lean and occasionally testy, looking north to the more cerebral Bach.

Lyricism certainly rules in a transcription of one of the songs from Lilburn's Sings Harry cycle as well as in the Canzonas, the most convincing of which is the first, arranged by the composer himself.

Those who seek Lilburniana will appreciate three unpublished pieces which Herbig has rescued from the archives. The first, with its shifting textures and moods, catches the man as many knew him.

David Farquhar's Suite shows a composer more finely attuned to the guitar's colouristic potential in the chiming insistence of its "Ostinato" movement and the brilliant slashes of sound in its "Rondino".

Farquhar's Prospero Dreaming gives the album its title and is an eight-minute Fantasy written in the wake of the composer's final opera, The Enchanted Isle, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero Dreaming has the air of an otherworldly rhapsody to it. Major melts into minor and vice versa, textures unfold and blur, reflecting the tensions between the worlds of magic and reality that underpin both Farquhar's opera and the original Shakespeare play.

Gunter Herbig is one of our finest guitarists, as adept at an allemande from an early lutenist as he is with the music that New Zealand composers have written for him. Brazilian-born, he also has a special gift for the Latin-American repertoire and inevitably imbues other music with some of its fire.

The essential character of much of the music on this CD comes from its sounding as if it might have been improvised on the spot. That Herbig has conveyed this impression, with no sacrifice of tonal beauty or structural logic, is a mark of his artistry.