New Videos By Laurel Harned - Including a Duet with Brady Davis!

Californian guitarist Laurel Harned recently visited our showroom in Santa Monica. Despite her young age, she has already earned several prizes and scholarships, including the 2024 Kent Cooke Young Artist Award, which enabled her to spend a month studying guitar in Spain. She came to GSI to record three videos featuring works by Romantic and Neo-Romantic composers.

One of the pieces she recorded is “Hungarian Fantasy” by Johann Kaspar Mertz, an Austrian guitarist-composer active in Vienna in the early 19th century. Part of his 3 Morceaux, Op. 65, the piece was published posthumously in 1857 and has since become a staple of the Romantic guitar repertoire. Laurel performed it on a 2025 Ariel Ameijenda guitar.

She also recorded the well-known “Thème Varié and Finale” by Manuel María Ponce, written in 1926 and dedicated to Andrés Segovia. It remains one of Ponce’s most recognized works among classical guitarists. For this recording, she played a 1926 Francisco Simplicio guitar.

Finally, Laurel recorded “Fandango en Rondeau” by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in a duo setting with guitarist Brady Davis. This energetic final movement of Sonatina Canonica blends the Spanish fandango rhythm with a classical rondo form. Both guitarists used 2025 Masaki Sakurai instruments for the recording.