With two guitars through many styles

The Austrian guitarist, music teacher and publisher Michael Langer has enriched the "Saitenwege" series from Edition Dux with two more music books, this time with a total of 88 pieces for two guitars. The structure of the albums corresponds exactly to the editions The very easy entry and The easy introduction to the world of classical guitar Each volume presents between five and eleven more or less representative pieces from the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Multicultural and Pop styles. The only difference, apart from the duo instrumentation: instead of the categories "very easy" and "easy", the two volumes are assigned to the categories "easy" and "moderately difficult".

Michael Langer deals freely with the musical material, with a good sense for a sensible middle way between faithfulness to the original and technically easy to realize interpretation. Most of the pieces are newly arranged by him. Thus we encounter not only typical guitar pieces, but also, for example, excerpts from Vivaldi's Four seasons or Mozart's Magic flute. Only a few duos - for example by Maria Linnemann - appear in the original musical text, and some arrangements were originally solo pieces.

Within the stylistic areas, the pieces tend to be arranged in progressive levels of difficulty. One focus, especially in the second volume, is on Latin American numbers from the simple Bailecito to the Libertango by Astor Piazzolla. In the pop category, there are real hits from Queen, George Ezra and Ed Sheeran included Happy by Pharrell Williams. If you don't know how this is supposed to sound on two classical guitars, you can download all of the publisher's recordings with a download code or listen to them on Spotify.

Michael Langer: Saitenwege for two guitars. Six centuries of guitar music for guitar duo; vol. 1, easy, D 918; vol. 2, medium, D 919; € 29.80 each, Dux, Manching