 Non content d'être le violoniste virtuose génial que l'on sait Nicolo Paganini pratiquait depuis son plus jeune âge la guitare et la mandoline. S'il confia souvent l'instrument à dix cordes pour l'accompagnement dans sa musique de chambre, il composa aussi ce recueil de trente-sept Sonates pour guitare seule dont s'est emparé le guitariste italien Massimiliano Filippini. Systématiquement introduite par un minuetto suivi d'un Rondoncino, d'un Andantino, d'une valz ou d'un Perligordino (!) chaque Sonate s'organise en deux mouvements bien distincts. Elles sont également toutes, exceptées les 33 et 28, dans une tonalité majeure. Si leur charme repose essentiellement sur leur fraîcheur mélodique et leur rythme roboratif, elles comportent souvent des embûches techniques et exigent un doigté hors-pair (n° 33, 18 et 20). Partenaire d'une guitare légendaire (Une Gaetano Guadagnini fabriquée à l'époque du compositeur en 1823), l'interprète les exécute avec brillance et vélocité sans chercher à y instiller des affects intempestifs. (Jérôme Angouillant) Nicolò Paganini (Genoa, 1782 - Nice, 1840) is universally renowned as the greatest violin virtuoso of all ??mes and as a huge innovator of violin technique. But the sources reveal that Paganini, besides being an extraordinary and eccentric virtuoso violinist, able to thrill the first half of the 19th century public in Italy and in the rest of Europe, was also a very skilled guitarist, even though his performances with this instrument happened only in private occasions; in fact we don’t have any testimony of public guitar executions. Paganini himself, in his autobiography tells about his relationship with plucked instruments, relationship that started at a very young age. We are around the year 1795-1796, when Paganini started being interested in the guitar, so from that moment on, until the year 1804, we would compose the main corpus of his guitar works, consisting in 37 sonatas for guitars (M.S. 84) and the 5 sonatas (M.S. 85) that are the object of the present recording in which the Italian guitarist Massimiliano Filippini plays a wonderful guitar made by Gaetano Guadagnini in Turin in 1823. Paganini wrote these words to his friend Luigi Guglielmo Germi, in January 7th 1824: “I’m writing to you because a lady is looking for a beautiful, but most importantly, fine guitar, if she finds it here let me know, otherwise ask my brother, meaning to demand him to inquire from my copyist where or in which village of Piemonte lives that fellow whose name I don’t recall, but who is an excellent artist for guitars, and commission him a good instrument, well refined and well sounding. Please take care of this.” Therefore Paganini knew about a great Piedmontese artisan, an “excellent artist for guitar”; he perhaps heard about the fantastic acoustic results of the new model of guitar made by the young Gaetano Guadagnini? We don’t know, but this is a suggestive hypothesis that makes even more coherent his choice of using a Guadagnini guitar of the year 1823, to record the Paganini Sonatas for guitar.
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