BWW Interviews: Sharon Isbin, Guitar Great Returns to New York

By: Dec. 04, 2013
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Guitar genius Sharon Isbin with a few of her friends.

On Saturday, December 14th, 2013 at 8PM, GRAMMY Award-winning guitarist Sharon Isbin returns to the 92nd St. Y for a solo recital. The concert celebrates her 35th anniversary of her New York Debut (at Alice Tully Hall in 1979), the 25th anniversary of The Juilliard School guitar department (which Sharon Isbin created in 1989, the first in the institution's 100-year history), and honors the 100th birthday on this date of her mentor Rosalyn Tureck, as well as the centenary of Benjamin Britten.

Tickets are on sale now at www.92y.org/Uptown/Event/Sharon-Isbin.aspx

Ms. Isbin's program for this event includes J.S. Bach's Suite BWV997 from the landmark performance editions she created in collaboration with Rosalyn Tureck (December 14, 1913-July 2003), published by G. Schirmer. Ms. Isbin also performs Britten's Nocturnal, his only solo work for guitar, Bruce MacCombie's Nightshade Rounds written for Sharon Isbin, and music by Agustin Barrios Mangoré.

It's useless to try to describe Sharon Isbin's artistry with mere words, because every superlative ever invented has already been used. However, if you have never seen Sharon Isbin live, don't walk, run to the 92nd St. Y and get tickets! Her concerts are extraordinarily special events and this one will be extra special indeed.

In anticipation of her big recital on Dec. 14th, Ms. Isbin sat down for an interview with BWW Classical. As always, she was warm, witty, insightful, and disarmingly funny.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of watching your pre-concert routine. It was fascinating.

If you don't take the time to properly prepare, you are not going to have a good result. I really try to take responsibility for my audience. Years ago the guitar was beginning to get a bad name because so many artists really didn't take responsibility for their audience. Even Segovia for example simply refused to use any amplification whatsoever not matter what size hall he performed in. I like to arrive hours before the performance and even before my first rehearsal, I walk the hall to get a sense of the acoustics. If I am performing with an orchestra I may take even longer. I'll tyoically bring another guitarist in to play their guitar on the stage while I walk the space and get a feel for it. I can then set the EQs and the volume - that is of course, if the space requires any amplification - and I have two custom-made speakers behind me on the stage that I can control the volume of myself, and the sound is single source coming from immediately behind me. And as I said, if you don't take the time to properly sound check and EQ then you are not going to have a good result when you play.

I remember at that rehearsal you asked Elliott Forrest (of WQXR) to play your guitar during the sound check - but first you told him to go wash his hands!

Absolutely! It's very important because everyone has different oils in their hands and you don't want to contaminate your instrument before you go out there to play!

You have a new album out called Guitar Passions that features a vast array of wonderful musicians.

It's really an homage to some of my many guitar heroes. And in it I was able to invite guests like rock guitar guru Steve Vai, who is one of the finest guitarists in the world, and who, incidentally, I had a dream about last night! I dreamed he and I were leading a big choir of kids in a sing-a-long! I also invited another great rock player, Steve Morse of the Dixie Dreggs. I used to listen to the band Heart a lot when I was in college and on this album I do one of my favorites, "Dreamboat Annie," with Nancy Wilson of Heart. Romero Lubambo is also on the album and he is actually joining me in an 18 city Guitar Passions tour in February along with Stanley Jordan, one of the great creative minds in Jazz guitar and especially the tapping technique.

Thiago de Mello, the great melodic percussionist, is on the album also. As you know Thiago passed away two weeks ago, and interestingly enough, I received the news that he passed away while I was watching his face on a big screen, doing the sound mix for a new documentary on me that has just been completed. In fact we had just had a premier screening in Brussels only a few days later. He was such a great guy and we performed together for many many years. He was a great friend and great musical colleague, he had just turned 80 going on 50. I'm glad people can see the video the three of us did, Thiago, Paul Winter and I, when we made our first album together in 1997. I just posted it on the video page of my website, and you can get a real sense and a context of the jungle, and the animals and the indigenous sounds that make it so special. We reprised with a new work that he wrote called O Presidente, on Guitar Passions.

Ultimately all The Players on the album, although they have very different styles, share a lot of common ground. For example, I was so happy to hear that so many of Steve Vai's facebook fans - and he's got like two million of them - when they were exposed to my music, they were really really excited about it. It's just a matter of being able to share your language, your expression with different groups. There's a great segment in the documentary, where Steve Vai and I are hanging out at his home and jamming together. He actually gave me an electric guitar lesson!

Do you remember your first guitar?

Remember it? I still have it! I was nine years old and my family was living in Italy and my brother had asked for guitar lessons. When my parent got him a classical guitar, he wasn't interested. He wanted to be Elvis Presley. My parents had already found this teacher who had studied with Segovia and since my brother wasn't interested, I volunteered to take lessons with him. We had a guitar specially made for me, after all I was nine years old and it just took off from there. I only played acoustic, classical guitar, because it was all I knew. Something that probably would have been unheard of if we had been living in the United States. And I only had a teacher until I was sixteen, then I was on my own.

So what are you playing now?

I'm playing a German guitar right now by Toni Mueller. In fact I just saw him in Belgium, he drove up for my concert there and he's building me another instrument right now that I'll receive in January and I'm very excited about it. It's a really beautiful instrument; it's a double-top, so the response is very fast, the projection is amazing, and the tone is really warm and beautiful.

And what was the first classical guitar record you ever bought?

Well, I didn't buy it. My parents actually bought it, but the first one that I really remember falling in love with was Julian Bream playing the Rodrigo concierto on one side and the Gloriana Dances by Brittan on the other. He and Segovia were probably my earliest classical influences, but I also grew up listening to a lot of flamenco guitar. It was quite popular in Minneapolis, where we moved after we returned from Italy. My mother was a fan and had a lot of flamenco guitar records. So the whole Spanish culture was something that I was quite steeped in from a very early age. Probably one of the primary reasons that I really identify with Spanish music.

But music was never going to be my career. I was supposed to be either a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon and I would spend many hours each day building and launching model rockets. But my father insisted that I put in at least an hour on the guitar before I could play with my rockets. So that was the bribe to get me to practice! One of the first pieces I ever learned was the Brittan Nocturnal and I will be playing it at the concert on the 14th. I started practicing like five hours a day and when I was fourteen years old, I won a contest. And the prize was a performance in front of ten thousand people with the Minnesota Orchestra as soloist. I decided there and then that music was more exciting that launching my worms and grasshoppers into outer space!

BWW CLASSICAL thanks Sharon Isbin for sharing her time and thoughts with us and we look forward with great anticipation to her recital on Dec. 14th!

SHARON ISBIN

Saturday, December 14th, 2013 at 8PM

The 92nd St. Y

Tickets are on sale now at www.92y.org/Uptown/Event/Sharon-Isbin.aspx

Photo by J. Henry Fair



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