The lecture examines how the first professional guitar soloists in Greece, Dimitri Fampas and Gerassimos Miliaressis, shaped their repertoire and how they used it to have the guitar recognised as an instrument of art music. Until 1950 guitar recitals in Greece were few, with programmes ill-matched to one another, so the repertoire had to be built from scratch. The lecture goes back to the poor repertoire of the guitar at the beginning of the 20th century and to the two phases of borrowing that enriched it: transcriptions of piano music, with a programme of Francisco Tárrega (Rome, 1903) as an example, and the adaptation of “early” music for vihuela and lute. It examines the role of Andrés Segovia: the works dedicated to him by non-guitarist composers from the 1920s onwards, the new type of programme he presented, in Athens too in 1931, and the Suite in A minor that he played as a work by Sylvius Leopold Weiss, although it had been written on commission by Manuel Ponce. Fampas and Miliaressis, who studied with Segovia in the period 1949–1956, followed this type of programme, with their teacher as their only model. The lecture examines their difficulties in obtaining the works, the structure of the programmes, usually in chronological order, the absence of avant-garde music and the place of Greek music, and compares two recitals by Fampas (Volos 1965, Madrid 1967). It closes with the modernisation of the repertoire by the younger generation, from the 1970s onwards, and with a discussion of how one chooses the works for a recital.
Presentation. The lecture was given on 31 March 2018 at the 27th Guitar Festival of Patras (30 March – 2 April 2018, Philharmonic Society of Patras).