The acclaimed Italian guitarist Gianluigi Giglio makes his debut on SOMM Recordings with The 19th Century Guitar, a scintillating recital of music by Fernando Sor, a pioneering champion of the guitar in the vanguard of raising its profile out of the tavern and into the concert hall. Giglio’s wide-ranging recital explores Sor’s innate feeling for the guitar and charts the increasing demands he placed on the instrument in a body of work that transformed its standing with public and pundits alike. From the early Op.9 masterpiece that charted a new and expressive landscape for the guitar – Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Mozart – to the late Elegiac Fantasy (Op.59) with its leanings towards newly-emerging Romanticism, this is a textbook display of the instrument’s many abilities given eloquent voice by a master guitarist. Gianluigi Giglio plays a guitar made by the noted Parisian luthier René Lacôte in Paris in 1834.