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Works ‘n’ Progress

by Paul Bass | Dec 12, 2006 12:12 pm

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Posted to: Arts

New Haveners were the first Americans to hear a new guitar concerto performed—and to get a first glimpse of the next generation of Yale-spawned classical pioneers. Click on the play arrow for a sampling.

The premiere climaxed a concert at Sprague Hall Monday night featuring guitarists studying at Yale School of Music. They study under one of the world’s guitar pioneers, Benjamin Verdery, a genre-bender who combines classical, rock, jazz, electronic, and other forms into cutting-edge music. For 25 years Verdery has turned Yale into a training ground for top guitarists, who tend to return to New Haven from far-flung points to pay tribute to him. Monday’s concert was more conventional than those tribute concerts, as these students are honing their chops and learning which rules to break.

Still, while the two hours worth of selections all fit neatly under the title “Guitar Chamber Music,” they nevertheless showed the breadth of that category, both in form and performance.

In other words, the casual listener would still listen to the free-flowing changes of a piece like Paulo Bellinati’s “Jongo,” as performed by Simon Powis and Dave Veslocki (click on the play arrow for a sampling), and observe the rigid categories of “chamber” and “classical” float away.

That was especially true when Powis and Veslocki ignored the nylon strings of their guitars for an interlude. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought you’d temporarily moved to a “Drum Chamber Music”—or just “Drum Music”—concert. Click on the play arrow below to watch.

The final piece was the evening’s climax, the American premiere performance of Shingo Fuji’s three-part Concerto do Los Angeles. All seven guitarists, who had earlier played in smaller ensembles with each other or accompanists on other instruments, performed the piece together. Julian Pellicano conducted; Rupert Boyd soloed.

The piece reflected the pacing of the entire evening. Each of the concert’s two sets reached back centuries to begin—Bach in the first set, Scarlatti after intermission—then progressed to more modern composers. Similarly, Concerto de Los Angeles began with a movement named for, and very much in the E minor-to-B7 mode, of Fernando Sor. (At least that’s how this very amateur blues guitarist recognizes it.) Then it progressed to more modern variations.

Click on the play arrow here for a sampling of that first movement. Then click again on the play arrow at the top of this article to hear how, in the third and final movement, the guitarists’ parts built on each other, one by one, to a sound that would find a home on Windham Hill or Rounder Records as easily as in Sprague Hall.

As always in the Verdery-inspired guitar concerts to which New Haven is treated a couple of times each year (often free of charge, as on Monday night), the beautiful results were grounded in tradition and liberated to explore worlds unbound by category or physics.

Theresa Calpotura and Yuri Liberzon performed Ravel's Pavane pour une infant defunte.

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