Eladio Scharrón is Associate Professor of Classical Guitar at the University of Central Florida in Orlando since 1998. He is a graduate from the University of Puerto Rico where he studied guitar with Ernesto Cordero. After obtaining the BA in music, he went to Paris to continue graduate studies in guitar under the direction of Alberto Ponce. In 1981 he obtained the prestigious Diplôme de Concertiste at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. Eladio Scharrón has won numerous awards and competitions, among them the Concurso de Guitarra de la Casa de España in Puerto Rico, the International Guitar Competition of Sable Sur Sarthe in France, and the Reynolds Musical Award. He has also participated as a soloist in prestigious international guitar festivals in France, Belgium, Italy, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Mexico and the United States.

"These recordings, made between 1924 and 1944, capture the singer in her prime in a cross-section of her repertoire, with a generous number of spirituals that she sang with utter sincerity and a unique contralto voice that reached into the stratosphere."

One of the most important composers writing for the guitar in the early 20th century was Manuel Ponce. During the early 1920s he produced some of his best works, a result of his new-found friendship with guitar virtuoso Andres Segovia. In a letter to Ponce, Segovia mentioned that he was only the third non-guitarist ever to compose new works for the guitar. (The others were Federico Moreno Torroba and_Manuel de Falla.) A number of ambitious pieces came out of the Ponce-Segovia collaboration, and several of those are featured on this new release with guitarist Eladio Scharron.

There is nobody who has not come across one or another of Domenico Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas, for they are the most celebrated part of his body of work. Who, however, knows anything of the fifteen operas and the dozens of arias, duets and cantatas, or of his oratorios and various other sacred works?

Anna Moffo was one of the leading sopranos at the Metropolitan Opera in New York throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. To many opera-lovers in the USA, she was quite simply the most beautiful diva of her era. She was certainly one of the most talented, possessing an appealing stage presence, a lyric soprano voice of full, ratdiant tone and an impeccable coloratura technique, which she used with excellent musical taste.

Rachmaninov's songs for voice and piano count among his most heartfelt and beautiful compositions. Since his better-known piano preludes ooze melody from their every pore, why not adapt the songs for solo piano and you'll have what amounts to an additional set of Rachmaninov preludes? That's precisely what Earl Wild did with 13 of these gems. He doesn't merely weld the vocal lines onto the original piano accompaniments; instead, he fleshes out the textures in a style very much in keeping with the lush polyphony and galvanic rhythm typical of Rachmaninov's solo keyboard writing. And nobody plays Earl Wild transcriptions better than Earl Wild. From the bristling cascades in "The Little Island" to the wistful long lines and pent-up agitation of the familiar "Vocalise", Wild's unerring sense of style and utterly natural, singing technique hold your attention.