Audiophile Audition has a new review for Viviana Guzman and Jérémy Jouve’s new Traveling Sonata recording and says that several of the “new-minted works with fresh new sounds make for an appealingly varied program.” The reviewer, Lee Passarella, calls the unique pairing of flute and guitar a pairing of “gentle” instruments and states that Guzman and Jouve programmed some perfectly tailored transcriptions – “all of which have a soothing nocturnal quality to them, Satie’s ironically named work (Gymnopédie No. 1) coming close as musically possible to suggesting a state of suspended animation. This is lovely music, lovingly played by Guzman and Jouve.” Passarella was also impressed by Jouve’s arrangement of François Borne’s Fantaisie brillante sur Carmen, saying that not only was it “skillfully arranged,” but also that the performance was “as colorful and lively as can be.”
But what most impressed this reviewer, were the more contemporary works on the recording like Ourkouzounov’s Sonatine, about which he states “the harmonies and rhythms of popular music, especially jazz, making for an enjoyable mix of hot and the cool.” And of Roland Dyens’s Traveling Sonata, Passarella hears the travels referenced within the title saying “this is a musical travelogue that recalls excursions to Bellizona in Italian-speaking Switzerland, the small Italian city of Mottola, and the Turkish city of Ankara…This is easily my favorite work amongst the contemporary ones on the program.” And guitarist Jérémy Jouve brings Passarella home with the premiere recording of Duplessy’s Cavalcade – “It’s a kind of perpetual motion machine, alternating near-inaudible chords and arpeggios with big strummed chords…and other tricks of the guitarist’s trade. Jouve plays it with fearless bravura.”
Passarella gives the recording a four-star rating and ends with “Guzman and Jouve offer a varied program of many pleasures, and I recommend it to just about everyone.”