Denis Azabagic will be the SSO guest artist on Saturday at Symphony Hall.
Classical guitarists are a rare breed in the world of orchestral concertos.
Springfield Symphony Orchestra concertgoers have a chance to hear one of the best in the business, playing a rarely heard, marvelously mysterious work when Denis Azabagic joins Maestro Kevin Rhodes and the SSO in American composer Alan Hovhaness’ Guitar Concerto No. 1 on Saturday night at in Symphony Hall.
“It’s a strange piece,” Azabagic said of the Hovhaness concerto, “a mixture of so many different styles and influences – Spanish, Oriental, Middle-eastern, even medieval sounds, and a clearly American-sounding second movement.”
According to CD liner notes written by Hovhaness’ widow, the Guitar Concerto Op. 325 was written for Bolivian-born virtuoso Javier Calderon upon Calderon’s request, on commission from SRO Production Performing Artist Management in conjunction with the Minnesota Orchestra. Calderon gave the premiere performance in the summer of 1979 with Leonard Slatkin conducting the Minnesota Orchestra.
The first commercial recording made of the work featured New York guitarist David Leisner, with Gerard Schwarz conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony on the Naxos American Classics label. Leisner is a friend of Azabagic and mentioned the piece to him before going to Berlin to record it, hence it entered the Bosnian artist’s repertoire.
“My first teacher in Tuzla was a very serious pedagogue, and taught me so thoroughly about music and got me interested in what the classical guitar could do that I pursued that aspect of guitar playing,” he said in a recent telephone interview from Chicago, where he and his wife, flutist Eugenia Moliner, serve on the faculty of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.
Though his parents were not musicians, they saw fit to send Azabagic to a specialized music elementary school where the foundation was laid for his prize-winning career.
Between 1992 and 1999 he won 24 prizes in international competitions, 11 of them first prizes. The 40-year-old has recorded seven CDs and two DVDs, and is considered by many to be the best classical guitarist of his generation.
Asked for advice to young players aspiring to a career centered on the classical guitar, he said “You have to diversify – there are far more good young players than there are solo opportunities, and since the guitar is not an orchestral instrument, you seek out chamber music opportunities wherever they arise.”
Azabagic and Moliner have found great success as the Cavatina Duo, and Azabagic was recently hired to play in the orchestra for Osvaldo Golijov’s opera “Ainadamar.”
Rubbing elbows with the Hovhaness Concerto on Saturday’s concert is another rarely heard American composition, Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 3. The work for which Harris is best known, the Symphony No. 3 is a single 18-minute movement cast in five sections, labeled by the composer “Tragic,” “Lyric,” “Pastoral,” “Fugue-Dramatic,” and “Dramatic-Tragic.” Serge Koussevitzky gave the premiere performance in 1939 with the Boston Symphony, though the piece was commissioned by the Netherlands-born cellist and founding conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., Hans Kindler.
Rhodes has chosen two compositions by Johannes Brahms to complement the American classics, his jovial, avuncular “Academic Festival Overture,” and his sublime “Variations on a Theme by Haydn.
“This is probably the most bizarre collection of pieces that have ever come together on one program,” Rhodes said. “I was trying to think of some European traditional composer and some link between an aspect of his music and some aspect of American music.”
Rhodes found the link in the use of pre-existent material.
“What has always struck me about these two works of Brahms is their recycling of older music. The ‘Academic Festival Overture’ borrows from student drinking songs, and the ‘Haydn Variations’ are based on this chorale attributed to Haydn,” he said. “It’s a reuse in the best sense of the word.”
He added, “A similar thing happens with these two American composers. In the case of Roy Harris, he adapts everything from Puritan plainchant to cowboy songs to Mahlerian passages spinning out and developing into their own crazy world. Hovhaness, an Armenian-American composer, takes a similar kitchen sink approach with a New-Age ¤’70s sensibility.”
“Brahms is reusing things exactly from his own culture, it’s not in any way part of his psyche to use exotic elements to form something new. The Americans are borrowing from many sources,” Rhodes concluded. “This is the sort of tenuous thread that ties this concert together. Whether or not the pieces fit together, I’m convinced that it will be a wild experience to hear them together.”