Guitarist Giulio Cecchi - UnOriginal album - CD Review, May 18th, 2026
Songs by Enrique Granados, Witold Lutosławski and Isaac Albeniz, in transcriptions for guitar by Julian Bream.

Premiere album, released on February 27th

I suggest selections from this disc recorded by the Italian guitarist Giulio Cecchi, a 30-year-old talented and passionate musician, with numerous awards on his track records. His debut album is called UnOriginal and it contains the transcriptions for guitar of some songs created for piano by composers from different eras, from baroque to the modern period - works of Domenico Scarlatti, Sylvius Leopold Weiss, Felix Mendelssohn, Isaac Albeniz, Bela Bartok and Witold Lutoslawski. The arrangements of the works, unpublished until now in these versions for guitar, were created by Julian Bream, a legendary guitarist who lived between 1933 and 2020, and who had a consistent role in the history of this instrument.

In the album's booklet, the Italian guitarist and musicologist Leonardo de Marchi notes: "The transcriptions for guitar of Julian Bream belong to a historical conjuncture in which the guitar ceased to be limited to lounge music and to the aristrocratic society. By the end of the 19^th century, it became an important concert instrument. The ones who boosted the modern rise of the guitar were the Spanish men Francisco Tárrega, Miguel Llobet and Andrés Segovia, to whom the public opinion attributes the revival of this instrument. At the end of the last century, more guitarists extended the canon beyond the Segovian paradigm, Julian Bream being one of the most prominent ones. He left us a wonderful collection of guitar arrangements, covering creations from the Renaissance and the Baroque to the 20^th century music." The guitarist Giulio Cecchi offers us not only a pleasant listening, but also a sound document, capitalizing on this extraordinary fund of musical transcriptions made by Julian Bream, now released on disc for the first time.

The guitarist Giulio Cecchi, born in Florence in 1997, studied at musical schools in Modena, Siena, and London, and has a vast concert activity in Italy and the United Kingdom, focusing especially on the contemporary repertoire. He is also a guitar teacher at prestigious education institutions in Italy. In 2024, his project "UnOriginal" - dedicated to the works transcribed for guitar by Julian Bream - received a Residenze Erranti funding. This institution contributed to the production of this album released by Giulio Cecchi at the label Da Vinci Classics.