Milos review, Wigmore Hall: His refined musicality is second to none among guitarists

The musician has returned to the London venue after living through his ‘wildest musical fantasies’

The Montenegrin player has a story worth telling (Lars Borges/Mercury Classics)

In 2009 Milos Karadaglic made his London debut as a young unknown at the Wigmore Hall. Since then, as just plain Milos, this peerless Montenegrin guitarist has established himself as the anointed successor to Julian Bream, and has released a series of acclaimed autobiographical CDs. And his story is indeed worth telling.

His beginnings were hard. In order to audition for a place at the Royal Academy of Music at a time when his region of the Balkans was under western bombardment, he had to film himself playing his repertoire in his living room, five days in a row, recording one piece at a time. He then had to ask his father for money to send the video to London by express post; but he got in.

More recently he suffered what would be for most musicians the most terrifying threat imaginable. “I was playing many concerts,” he told me, “and my hands were starting to hurt – and I didn’t know what it was.” Repetitive strain injury? “Yes, that’s how it started, but then it spiralled into other issues, and I completely lost the ability to play. I couldn’t even hold a glass, or button my shirt, or brush my teeth. I went to a lot of doctors and saw a lot of specialists, and some of them gave me a devastating prognosis – that I would not recover, and would never play again. That gave me huge psychological strain.”

Typically he fought back, taking refuge in cooking, sociability, and a variety of non-musical activities, and after two years what he calls his “injury” gradually healed itself, and his mind was healed too. “I learned for the first time who I am,” he says, “and what kind of music I really wanted to make.” Last autumn he released a record on the Decca label which – taking his text from Paul Simon’s song – he entitled Sound of Silence. This was both therapy and also a musical exploration: “I gave myself the freedom to choose from so many different kinds of music, and to work with arrangers whose work I admired. I could live through my wildest musical fantasies. So we have a song by Radiohead alongside music by Tarrega and De Falla. I was able to show that music is one big thing, a universal expression. I could create a bridge and forge all this music into one.”

He’s come back to the Wigmore to present the fruits of this exploration: Bach and a clutch of classical composers from the Hispanic world, plus arrangements of three Beatles songs. Bach’s Lute Partita in C minor becomes a reminder of why Milos’s refined musicality is second to none among guitarists. Each movement is finely shaded, and the fugue has a smooth eloquence. Two Granados dances trip past with fleet delicacy, while Isaac Albeniz’s “Asturias”, in an arrangement by Milos’s tutor Michael Lewin, evinces a fine flamenco fury.

Interlarded with short pieces by Tarrega and De Falla, the programme continues with five Villa-Lobos preludes which allow Milos to play brilliant games with dynamics – from a wispy breath of wind to a raging tempest – but the Beatles numbers, though clever, come over as mere curiosities. The encore – a harmonically oblique rendering of “Over the Rainbow” – gracefully dematerialises.