Dewfield, Nicholas

Nicholas Dewfield

I first picked up a guitar when my parents brought one back from Valencia in Spain. Fortunately, the school I attended had recently engaged a classical guitar tutor, unusual for the time, and I was able to take advantage of this alongside my other musical pursuits. After leaving school, working for my father for 10 years, and then moving to Spain with my partner, I rediscovered my passion for playing and learning fuelled by recordings of Segovia, Bream, and Williams. Since then I have spent my time playing, teaching, composing and arranging music of all styles. I invested a lot of energy in passing down this passion to my children, resulting in two of them going on to study music at the University of Cambridge as pianists, and my other son is going to study in Barcelona with his guitar in hand.

I have been playing Weiss' music for a long time and was surprised at the lack of published works for guitar. I then decided to fill the gap by transcribing the complete works of the London manuscript. Though many of the works seem similar when observing the notation, only by playing them does the uniqueness and compositional excellence of each work come through. It has been a mammoth undertaking, but an extremely rewarding one that has given me a profound insight into this great composer's style.