Tambourou

Tambourou (for Guitar Orchestra and Percussionists) 

If you like Dyens, this is particularly good, with textures and attention to detail that are exemplary. The typesetting is heroic too-l can only guess how many man-hours went in, but with so many blank pages in the part scores, I have no idea why the performance explanations are only in the full score, and not where they belong. 

This work is for players above Grade 8, but the reward, through the thoughtful and varied addition of percussion, is a piece that stands out from other modern compositions. -CD. 

Tambourou (for Guitar Orchestra and Percussionists) 

Roland Dyens 

Demanding but rewarding piece from an often challenging composer 

Sometimes being an ensemble reviewer means a mountain of work if only because the music itself is a mountain. This is 48 pages of score and nearly 70 pages of parts-a lot of paper to read through. 

Let's see if we can save you some time. If this is for you, you'll need four (preferably eight or 12) excellent guitarists, a bass guitarist who reads from bass clef (contrabass classical guitarists, walk away now), a percussion kit comprising rainstick, claves, tubular bells, handbells/tubular bells, congas, maracas, glockenspiel, triangle, gong, crotales, a Vibraphone, a marimba and timbales. That won't leave many of us wondering if this is the right piece to buy; indeed, I may be talking to myself at this juncture . 

The edition begins with the now-customary two pages of CV for the composer and a page of explanations of the various symbols and performance indications, though some seem redundant. 

Explaining what "solo" means is one, and the "don't move for 3 seconds" at the end of the piece is another. 

The four guitar parts are tuned to 6=F, E, D and C respectively, but this is as much for ease of performance as it is for anything devious, and the technical challenges, as is so often the case with Dyens, are about the constant perturbations in the meter of the piece and the need to be aware of the current key signature, which includes four sharps and later, three flats (yes, every single note in the octave is poked at).