Click on the play arrow above and stick with this video for the first minute and five seconds; you’ll see the classical guitarist Entertainment Weekly calls “The Eddie Van Halen for eggheads” suddenly slam his guitar and swerve this piece into a thrilling new direction. Then read on — and watch some video clips — of the cutting-edge guitarists who took a Sprague Hall audience on a journey through the orbits of the old and the emerging new classical.
The journey alighted from Yale’s stunningly renovated concert hall on Saturday. It was an all-day “Yale Guiar Extravaganza” featuring performances, lectures, and workshops, a biannual event drawing experts and leading classical players from around the world. The event’s success is a testament to their organizer, Yale classic guitar prof Benjamin Verdery; some of his students, who have gone on to record and perform innovative work, return from far-flung climes to participate.
The breadth of where classical guitar is going, and has been, was on display in the two featured evening concerts.
The showcase performance began at 8 and featured Eden Stell Duo, which has emerged as a leading act in Europe. This was their first perfromance in the U.S.
Unlike so many modern classical guitarists, they perform in the old-fashioned ways — with their acoustic nylon-stringed guitars, period. No laptop computers at their sides, no wah-wah pedals, no Fender Strats. At least not in the first act of their Saturday performance. They tune up by ear, not by electronic gizmo.
And they stick to standard classical fare. What they bring to it, besides virtuosic playing and a winning stage manner, is their new arrangements — or “derangements,” as they put it at Sprague Saturday evening — of pieces originally played on or written for other instruments. For instance, click on the play arrow below to hear them performing Bach’s Concerto in D minor BWV 974; the duo “deranged” the piece from a version for oboe.
The pieces, again, at least those performed before intermission Saturday evening, were pleasant to the ear, soothing, with harmonies and progressions landing just where you’d expect, whether or not you’d heard the pieces before. In other words, it was safe music — and therefore not necessarily worth remaining for Act II.
Unlike the two performers who split the 5:30 show. They both studied under Verdery at Yale before making their names elsewhere. They represented the further-flung orbits that have gravitated from the Manhattan Project-like classical lab know as the Yale School of Music, where a generation of composers and performers have been experimenting with all forms of music known to mankind and mixing them in sometimes combustible concoctions. Their abbreviated sets left the audience hungering for more.
Michael Nicolella stretches the form while staying enough within the traditional chamber boundaries to perform with symphonies and earn comparison to Andres Segovia (in the Washington Post). He kept within those boundaries for most of his set Saturday.
Then Nicolella switched to the electric and brought out the boombox. The boombox bellowed the rants and taunts of young prison inmates from a documentary. Nicolella was playing Jacob ter Veldhuis’ “Grab It!” Click on the play arrow for a sample.
Before beginning, Nicolella warned the audience about raunchiness in the recorded backdrop. He suggested that people offended by such coarseness may wish to leave the hall for 10 minutes.
As it turned out the coarseness was projected more in the sound than in the words of the boombox bleatings. You could barely make out the words, beyond an occasional “fuck” or “motherfucker.” You could definitely hear the boombox, though; the agitated, angry sound of the inmates’ voices came through. It served as the percussion for the piece. Nicolella played heavy-metal leads off the percussive notes. It made for interesting, discomfiting music. Like other electric-driven pieces I’ve heard at these inspired Yale classical guitar showecases, this one didn’t move me. It’s a personal bias. I love the experimentation. But I’ve never been a big Jimi Hendrix or Frank Zappa fan, either. I recognize their brilliance and technical skill, as well as the value of their determination to stretch boundaries. But I look for warmth, or some psychic resolution, in the chaos. To me, the great challenge for boundary-benders is to produce music we find challenging and interesting—and, in some way, pleasing or redeeming. Soaring is a two-party process; the successful musical astronaut brings the audience along on the ride. inspired showecases. The Police’s Andy Summers got my attention when he performed a screeching “classical” piece with Ben Verdery at Yale last year, but he didn’t move or transport me.
That’s not to discount the value of experimenting with new sounds within the classical tradition. To produce gems, you need to put out pieces that won’t appeal to everyone; even duds can help give rise to important new art. In every concert, there’s at least one act (sometimes more) that succeeds and leaves a lasting imprint. One of those was a pair of Verdery alums, Geremy Schulick and Brett Parnell, now in New York making music as the Three-Fifty Duo. Their performance at Sprague this past March included tasteful electric-guitar playing that built on its acoustic counterpart and incorporated modern sounds with the traditional. I’ve since purchased their CD, a flowing excursion through Brahms, Coldplay, the Super Mario Brothers, and best of all their own original compositions, all landing on new terrain with a grounding in classical tradition.
This Saturday night the most memorable performer was Dominic Frasca. He is known as a Steve Reich-inspired composer and performer. And indeed, his pieces relied on repetitive, hypnotic arpeggios with melody and improvision laid on top of it. Frasca took those lines in a hearty direction on the lower strings. But the pieces turned out infused with more warmth, more “conventionally” beautiful, than I was expecting from the written description. The video clip of “Forced Entry” at the top of this story shows, mid-way, how Frasca, in Yale Music School tradition, roams free from the fetters of standards positionings, or even the notion of simply plucking the strings of a guitar rather than slapping the body or pounding the fretboard. In another piece, “Fixations Part 4,” Frasca was more restrained, but absolutely elegaic. Click on the arrow here for a sampling. Not all the music played Saturday night qualified as “beautiful.” The event itself — and the approach to music New Haven has been branding — certainly do.
Thanks for the coverage of this event. I wanted to attend but was unable and I am glad to read about it. (and see it too!). Out of curiosity, I ran a search on the NH Register site and found nothing. It truly is great to have the Independent covering local news and events.