Tony McManus
Album: Mysterious Boundaries
Label: Greentrax
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.tonymcmanus.com

A beautifully eyecatching cover shot tantalises you in preparation for the captivating and beguiling music encased within this arty digipack. This is sensitive acoustic guitar playing of the most musical kind, brilliant in technique yet no noodling and yes, making a genuinely beautiful sound, intensely lyrical and yet highly precise and poised.

The mysterious boundaries, Tony theorises, are those between Celtic traditional music and what might loosely be termed classical repertoire, and his exploration of this often greyed area was spurred on by mandolinist Mike Marshall setting him a challenge to learn Bach's famously scintillating E major Prelude (originally written for solo violin as part of the Partita No.3, but recycled even by its composer elsewhere in his output) - from which sprang the eager embracing of learning other music of the classical, pre-classical and baroque eras which he'd hitherto considered outwith his scope. Strictly speaking, the disc's menu isn't confined to the baroque, but also includes Erik Satie's enigmatic first Gnossienne and the fourth of Granados' Spanish Dances (both pieces composed at the start of the 1890s), and transcriptions of the medieval hymn Pange Lingua and an intimate moment from Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers (the motet Nigra Sum), both of the latter providing time-stopping highlights on a consistently magical disc. The most extended item, however, which clocks in at nearly 13 minutes (and not a minute too long), is another Bach transcription, the Chaconne from the D-minor solo violin Partita No. 2, whose limpid, intricate cascades of melody are immaculately and thrillingly rendered by Tony without a trace of artifice or forcing.

The CD's bookends are two separate renditions of a singularly enigmatically titled keyboard piece by French baroque maestro Couperin (the second, intriguingly, here performed on baritone guitar to replicate the tone of the contemporaneous theorbo, at times almost sounding like a harpsichord in its lower register).

The musicianship on display is nothing short of miraculous, and this is one of the classiest guitar records you're likely to hear. Far from being a tasteful but sterile exhibition of fretful fancy fingerwork, this really is elegance personified: breathtaking, and both stimulating and compelling, and yet done in a way that has no need to shout its virtues from the rooftops to grab your attention

David Kidman