Miniature Suite

Close Quarters

Children's Song

Ground Round

William Beauvais has been a member of the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music since 1980 and is currently developing curriculum for group-based guitar classes. As is clear from this suite for guitar duo, he is an experienced duo player himself. He has produced for more than 20 years, a regular output of guitar solo and duo compositions with various publishers. The compositional style is, as he claims himself, influenced by Leo Brouwer whom he frequently heard in Toronto in the early 1980s. But his typical jazz harmonies are not like Brouwer.
The first movement, Close Quarters, is poetic and the playing level is above Grade 4 because of the stretched chords. It's rhythmically challenging, going from 4/4 to 5/8 four times and alternating patterns of 2/8 and 3/8, making this piece one where the audience's attention is constantly drawn.
Children's Song is the second movement; as a middle piece it is the slower one. The theme is the one that you hear when you give a harmonica to a four year old and here it is worked out with interesting harmony and rhythmic patterns.
Some more stretched chords occur in Ground Round such as 1st on string 2 for C sharp with 2nd on string 6 for G sharp, needing the other fingers for harmony.
In these excellent duo pieces both instruments are of equal importance and both have interesting things to do. It can be recommended for the duo which wants to play contemporary yet palatable music.
This short suite has parts with the three pieces on two pages each and is therefore ideally edited for page turns. Rather than using slurs for legato, the composer prefers dashed curves, a standard I would like to see applied in all guitar music. Fingering is very well proportioned to those instances where it helps the player; as usual, quality printing and paper. As I am informed, sales of guitar duos reaches about one fifth of the business, so there will be plenty of buyers of this piece.
Jan de Kloe (Classical Guitar Magazine)