Videos

The Starry Night

The Starry Night by American guitarist and composer Jeremy Collins is inspired by Van Gogh’s painting of the same name. Created in 1889 during Van Gogh’s stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in southern France, it is now considered one of his most iconic works. Jeremy responded to this image with a piece that, for me, is among the most moving works written for guitar. Its unique color comes largely from an unusual scordatura: four of the six strings are retuned – only two remain in standard tuning – opening up an entirely new harmonic world. The music video for The Starry Night was filmed at the very place where the painting was created, in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. A magical place that made the shoot itself a truly special experience.

Kyoto Sonata

Marek Pasieczny’s Kyoto Sonata is inspired by three sacred sites in and around Kyoto, shaped by the composer’s encounter with Japanese aesthetics and spirituality. The piece requires an alternate tuning, lowering the second and sixth strings by a semitone, creating a sonority of shimmering dissonances and open resonance. It evokes both the Ichikosucho pentatonic scale and a Lydian brightness that colors the whole work.

Hundpromenaden

Daniel Rheinbay’s Hundpromenaden (Dog Walk) takes its name from a wordless picture book by Sven Nordqvist, creator of Pettson and Findus. It follows a boy and his dog through quirky, fantastical scenes. An ordinary walk turns into a surreal adventure.

Rheinbay’s music captures this playful spirit. In three episodic sections, it unfolds like a picture book: sounds shift and dissolve, fleeting images pass, and something unexpected always awaits. Humorous, tender, curious, and imaginative.

Autorretrato

Bojan Vuletić’s Autorretrato is inspired by Autorretrato a los 69 años by Francisco de Goya. Rather than idealizing the artist, Goya shows himself as an exhausted man, marked by life, an unflinching look behind the myth.

Vuletić’s piece likewise resists glorification. The music unfolds like an inner monologue: fractured, polyphonic, and sharply contrasted. Voices emerge, collide, and dissolve, like thoughts that surface and vanish again.

A musical soliloquy at the end of a restless life.

Servando

Servando by Cuban composer and guitarist Alí Arango is inspired by the visual world of the Cuban painter Servando Cabrera Moreno . In Cabrera Moreno’s paintings, human figures, animals, and plants often blend into one another, creating images that feel at once physical and dreamlike .

Alí’s music echoes this merging of forms: notes and harmonies melt into each other, boundaries blur like in a watercolor.

Tango

Isaac Albéniz’s Tango is one of his most famous pieces, originally part of the suite España, op. 165. Gentle and elegant, with a swaying character, it has been one of my favorite works since childhood. I recently recorded it in a session for Tonebase.

Limosna

"Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios" is one of the last works of the Paraguayan composer Agustin Barrios "Mangoré" and was written shortly before his death in El Salvador in 1944. The video was shot in an abandoned underground parking lot in Düsseldorf, Germany on a cold winter day.

Equinox

Equinox is one of Takemitsu’s late works and was composed in 1993. It is inspired by a picture of the same name by Spanish painter Joan Miró. Equinox is an astronomical event that occurs twice each year when daytime and nighttime are of approximately equal duration all over the planet.

Ciaccona

Alessandro Piccinini (1566-1638):

Ciaccona in partite variate

from Intavolatura di liuto et di chitarrone, libro primo (Bologna, 1623)

Si dolce 'l tormento

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): Si dolce è'l tormento

Mezzo-soprano: Paulina Schulenburg

Passacaglia

Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger (1580-1651): Passacaglia from Libro quarto d'intavolatura (Roma, 1640)

Tasteggio soave

Named after the mythological rider of Pegasos and the slayer of the Chimera, Bellerofonte Castaldi (1580-1649) lived a dazzling life as an adventurer, poet and musician in the early Seicento. In his Capricci (1622) he also claims to be the inventor of the tiorbino, a smaller, shorter-scaled theorbo for which this Tasteggio was composed.

Toccata Arpeggiata

Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger (1580-1651):

Toccata Arpeggiata from Libro primo d'intavolatura (Venezia, 1604)

Piccinini: Toccata

Alessandro Piccinini (1566-1638): Toccata XIII