‘while the world outside was dark, the place i could create through my guitar was as beautiful as i wanted it to be

Miloš Karadaglić

A man in a powdered-white curled wig takes his seat in the gilded room. He adjusts the frilled sleeves beneath a red velveteen jacket and begins to play. The first piece in the suite unfurls its contrapuntal fronds. Handel sits astride the backless chair, gently strumming and plucking his way through measured phrases. Or at least, he does in the imagination of Miloš Karadaglić, whose latest album, Baroque, is a compendium of works from that period, transcribed for the guitar. Although Handel lived in the same building that Jimi Hendrix would occupy centuries later – a connection celebrated through the recently opened Handel Hendrix House in London’s Brook Street – the composer wouldn’t recognise the modern-day guitar, a very different creature from the fretted stringed instruments of the 1700s.

Playing Handel’s pieces for harpsichord, among works by Vivaldi, Couperin, Scarlatti and others, has been a long-held ambition for Karadaglić. ‘There isn’t very much in the Baroque repertoire for the guitar except for one popular Vivaldi concerto and a handful of sonatas,’ he says. ‘There is no voice for the guitar in the Baroque context that is distinctive and that stands on its own.’

Karadaglić is used to giving the guitar a voice in areas it has previously remained unheard. With six studio albums to his name, the Montenegrin has pushed the instrument beyond its previous associations with Iberian soundworlds. These were nurtured by Andrés Segovia (1893-1987), the Spanish guitarist whose virtuosity and prolific commissioning from the likes of Ponce, Villa-Lobos and Rodrigo (including the iconic Concierto de Aranjuez, which Karadaglić recorded in 2014 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin) were bolstered by skilful guitarists like Julian Bream (1933-2020) – who is the dedicatee of Arnold’s 1958 guitar concerto, among others – and John Williams (the Australian musician rather than the US film composer). Karadaglić continues to expand the repertoire, commissioning concertante works such as Joby Talbot’s Ink Dark Moon and Howard Shore’s The Forest, and, for Baroque, new transcriptions.

An aspect of Baroque’s success is, paradoxically, the pieces you don’t hear.