Le petit livre de Marlène (CD incl.)

Sylvain Lemay is the man behind Les Productions D'Oz, the company that has produced perhaps more guitar music in the last years than most other companies combined. Here he proves his worth as a composer.
The pieces are childlike but not childish and relatively simple to play but quite sophisticated in spite of that. There are eight little pieces here, none more than a couple of minutes or two pages in length.
Marloubedou begins with a mainly chordal idea before speeding up into an arpeggiated semiquaver idea. Songe is exactly what you might expect, a tuneful slowish number, whilst Pon-Pon is vaguely jazzy and rhythmically bouncy. Mimi is in mainly two voices but moving quite swiftly whilst Berceuse pour Florence is arpeggio driven with the melody line in the upper part. Une Journée... has a number of different ideas and almost stops in midair, followed by Tourbillon which is based around a repeated E idea. The final Sud is syncopated with a number of time changes and slightly poppy in style This is a nice little volume with constantly interesting music which is a joy to listen to and a pleasure to play. Any moderately talented player would find this little set charming and fun to get their hands on.
Chris Dumigan (Classical Guitar Magazine)