By Anna Zhila

13 November, Sunday 4 30 pm, Emmanuel Church, West Hampstead

Fabio Zanon, guitar, who has been acclaimed as “one the most all-embracing talents in the international guitar scene”, (https://www.fabiozanon.com) will perform 12 Etudes by Francisco Mignone who was one of the most significant composers of the 20th century in Brazilian classical music.

An etude is a lie. Or rather, it is a beautiful, necessary deception. It presents itself as a dry, technical exercise, a problem of fingering or articulation to be solved. It is a piece of musical scaffolding, designed to build strength in the performer, but not intended for public display. But the greatest etudes, from Chopin to Ligeti, are always more than this. They are confessions. They are pocket-sized psychological dramas, character studies written in the demanding, physical language of the instrument itself. They are where the soul of a musician is forged.

This is the treacherous, exhilarating world we enter when we listen to the 12 Etudes of the Brazilian composer Francisco Mignone. And to hear them performed by the guitarist Fabio Zanon is to witness not just a technical feat, but a profound act of cultural excavation. This is not a recital; it is an archaeology of the soul. In the quiet, resonant space of a church in West Hampstead, Zanon is not just playing a series of difficult pieces. He is resurrecting a lost language of Brazilian modernism, a language of savage beauty, of intellectual rigour, and of a deep, complicated, and often contradictory love for his country.

The Ghost of the Salon

Francisco Mignone is one of the great, half-forgotten figures of 20th-century music. A contemporary of the more famous Heitor Villa-Lobos, Mignone was a man with a double consciousness. He was trained in the great European conservatories, a master of the classical forms, a musician who could speak the language of Milan and Paris with perfect fluency. But he was also profoundly, inescapably Brazilian. His music is the sound of this internal conflict, a constant, brilliant, and often violent wrestling match between the imported forms of European modernism and the raw, rhythmic, and spiritual material of his native land.

He was part of a generation of Brazilian artists and intellectuals - the architects Oscar Niemeyer, the writers Oswald de Andrade and Clarice Lispector - who were all grappling with the same fundamental question: how can we be modern, and still be ourselves? How do we take the sophisticated, often cynical, language of the European avant-garde and make it speak of a reality that is humid, chaotic, and steeped in a history of colonialism and syncretic spirituality? Mignone’s answer was to create a music that was both exquisitely crafted and thrillingly untamed.

Twelve Arguments in Search of a Guitar

The 12 Etudes for Guitar, composed in 1970 for the Uruguayan guitarist Abel Carlevaro, are the ultimate expression of this project. They are not the clean, almost neo-classical studies of Villa-Lobos, which have become a cornerstone of the guitar repertoire. They are something wilder, darker, and more emotionally volatile. They feel less like studies and more like twelve distinct, passionate, and occasionally contradictory arguments.

One is an argument for the percussive power of the instrument, a furious, street-fight of a piece, full of jagged, almost brutal, rhythmic figures. Another is an argument for the beauty of a dark, dissonant chord, a slow, mournful prayer that seems to hang in the air like incense. There is a drunken, stumbling waltz, a piece of sophisticated salon music that seems to be constantly on the verge of collapsing into chaos.

To listen to them in sequence is to be taken on a journey through the complex emotional landscape of a single, brilliant mind. Mignone is using the traditional form of the etude as a laboratory, a space to test the physical and expressive limits of the guitar. He forces the instrument to speak in new dialects, to make sounds that are not always pretty, but are always deeply, powerfully human. This is not the polite, well-behaved guitar of the Spanish salon. This is a guitar with dirt under its fingernails.

The Archaeologist of Sound

It is difficult to imagine a more perfect interpreter for this music than Fabio Zanon. He is not just a guitarist of breathtaking technical ability; he is a scholar, an intellectual, a conductor, and a writer. Like Mignone, he is a man who moves with equal ease in the high-minded world of European classical tradition and the deep, intuitive, and rhythmic world of Brazilian culture. He has the mind of a musicologist and the soul of a poet.

To watch him perform is to witness an act of intense, focused listening. His playing is not a display of ego. It is a process of discovery, of finding the narrative, the human voice, that is hidden within the dense, complex architecture of the notes. He is not just executing the music; he is inhabiting it. He has a unique ability to find the colour, the texture, and the emotional weight of every single note. The percussive snap of a string against the fretboard, the rich, resinous darkness of a bass line, the delicate, almost vocal, shaping of a melodic phrase - these are the tools of a master storyteller.

With this music, his task is particularly vital. The Mignone Etudes have, for too long, languished in relative obscurity, overshadowed by the more immediate appeal of Villa-Lobos. They are notoriously difficult, both technically and interpretively. In Zanon’s hands, they are revealed for what they are: one of the great, unsung masterpieces of the 20th-century guitar repertoire. He is not just performing them; he is making the definitive case for their importance. The concert, and the accompanying CD launch, is a landmark event. It is an act of cultural restoration, of placing a lost monument back on the map.

A Brazilian Soul in an English Church

The choice of venue for this performance is itself a piece of quiet poetry. To hear this humid, complex, sometimes violent music within the cool, restrained acoustics of the Emmanuel Church in West Hampstead is to experience a powerful sensory and cultural contrast. The music speaks of the heat, of the street, of the dense, tangled forest of the Brazilian imagination. The setting speaks of a different kind of history, a different kind of faith.

And yet, in that contrast, a powerful connection is forged. The concert becomes a space where these two worlds can meet and speak to each other. The universal, human truths at the heart of Mignone’s music - the rage, the tenderness, the humour, the spiritual yearning - are thrown into sharp relief by the sacred silence of the space.

This is, in the end, the ultimate argument for the power of music itself. It is a language that can transcend the boundaries of time, of geography, of culture. It can take the specific, local experience of a Brazilian composer in 1970 and make it feel immediate, urgent, and profoundly personal to an audience in a London church more than half a century later.

Fabio Zanon’s performance of the Mignone Etudes is more than a concert. It is an act of cultural repatriation, of bringing a ghost back from the wilderness. It is a reminder that the story of modern music is not a single, linear narrative dictated from the great cultural capitals of the North, but a vast, polyphonic, and global conversation. And in the savage, beautiful, and deeply human studies of Francisco Mignone, we are privileged to hear one of its most vital, and long-unheard, voices. We would be wise to listen.