Stefan Koim is a German guitarist with a rare double profile: he is equally at home on the modern classical guitar and on historical plucked instruments. He studied in Cologne, Salzburg, Boston and Würzburg with teachers including Hubert Käppel, Eliot Fisk, Jorge Ruck and Thomas Boysen, and received scholarships from the Fulbright Commission, the Rotary Foundation and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Today he heads the guitar department at the University of Osnabrück. You can read more in our artist profile of Stefan Koim.
For this Siccas Media recording he chose a true rarity of the repertoire: Segoviana Op. 366 by Darius Milhaud.
About Segoviana Op. 366
Segoviana is Darius Milhaud's only work for solo guitar. He wrote it in 1957 for Andrés Segovia, whose lifelong campaign to expand the guitar's repertoire brought dozens of leading twentieth-century composers to the instrument. The title is a direct homage to its dedicatee.
The piece is short but anything but slight. Milhaud writes with the harmonic freedom he was famous for — his signature polytonality colours the guitar's open-string sonorities in unexpected ways — and the result sits somewhere between a fantasy and a dance. Because Milhaud was not a guitarist, the writing pushes against the instrument's habits, which is exactly what makes it fascinating: the guitar is asked to sound like Milhaud, not like itself. It remains a connoisseur's piece, far less played than the works Segovia commissioned from composers closer to the guitar, and performances as assured as Koim's are rare.
About Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) was one of the most prolific French composers of the twentieth century and a member of 'Les Six', the group of Parisian composers who reacted against Impressionism in the 1920s. His years in Brazil as a young diplomat left a lifelong imprint of Latin American rhythm on his music, and his early embrace of jazz made him a pioneer of the crossover between concert music and popular idioms. He taught for decades at Mills College in California and at the Paris Conservatoire; his students included some of the most influential musicians of the postwar era.
That a composer of this stature left the guitar exactly one work makes Segoviana a small but precious document of the Segovia era — the period in which the modern guitar repertoire was built, piece by piece, through personal persuasion.
Watch the Performance
If you are curious about the repertoire Segovia's advocacy created, read our profile of Andrés Segovia and explore our overview of famous classical guitar pieces.
