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   One of the best guitarists in the world. Boston Globe She gets nuances out of the classical guitar few guitarists since Segovia have matched. Everything she performs bespeaks perfect technical control yet suggests spontaneous improvisation—the art that conceals art. Chicago Tribune |
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40 Magazines - 9 Countries Check out this television broadcast (RealPlayer) of Sharon from La Jolla Summerfest, 
the cover story features in
Fanfare
and in
Schwann Jazz & Classical magazine (PDF files), or
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 Thursday, July 10, 2003, Arts & Leisure Classical Guitar? By Barrymore Laurence Scherer The guitar’s versatility and ability to produce harmony as well as melody have lent themselves to a wide range of musical genres, from old Spain to the Old West to rock. The guitar also has a long though overshadowed tradition in classical music. Yet, despite its wide popularization by Andres Segovia (1893-1987), the classical guitar lingered at the edge of standard concert life—till now. The change is due largely to the American guitarist Sharon Isbin. Despite her virtuoso technique, Ms. Isbin’s concerns transcend display. “Emotion is the most important thing to me as a performer,” she says. “And performance is about making beautiful music and making music beautiful, something I learned when I heard Artur Rubinstein play Chopin in concert when I was 14.” Ms. Isbin’s repertoire embraces everything from Renaissance masters to jazz. Since 1989, Ms. Isbin has headed the Juilliard School’s guitar department, which she established, and between her many concerts she gives master classes world-wide. She is author of the “Classical Guitar Answer Book,” which addresses everything from how to memorize pieces more effectively to how often to change strings to the differences between spruce and cedar guitar tops. She also collaborated with the eminent Baroque keyboardist Rosalyn Tureck on the first performance editions for guitar of J.S. Bach’s lute suites. Faced with a limited concert repertoire for her instrument, Ms. Isbin has regularly commissioned new guitar works from a variety of major composers including Ned Rorem, Joan Tower, Aaron Jay Kernis and Christopher Rouse. Necessity has also obliged her to become a technological innovator: To make the soft-toned acoustic guitar practical for orchestral concerts in major halls, Ms. Isbin helped create a unique amplification system for it. Meanwhile, in what little spare time she allows herself, she maintains an active Web site (www.sharonisbin.com). Is it any wonder that some of her intimates call her “Ms. Guitar, Inc.”? The daughter of a chemical engineering professor at the University of Minnesota, she began studying guitar at nine. After winning her first competition at 14, she eventually went to Yale, and though she worked sporadically with a variety of guitar masters, Segovia among them, she was essentially self-taught after age 16.
Ms. Isbin’s system uses a wireless microphone clipped inside the sound hole of the guitar and a small omnidirectional acoustical box containing speakers, batteries and other electronic components, placed about 10 feet behind her among the orchestral players. A built-in graphic equalizer lets her adjust the system to a wide range of frequencies to suit any hall. In performance, the audience hears a “great big guitar” sound emerging naturally from the orchestra, while the speaker placement lets the orchestra musicians hear her clearly as well. She’s now the only one using this system but hopes it will catch on. Ms. Isbin’s discography reflects broad musical interests and includes “Journey to the Amazon,” with Brazilian percussionist Thiago de Mello and saxophonist Paul Winter, and “Wayfaring Stranger” (Erato), with that fine American mezzo-soprano Suzanne Mentzer. “Dreams of a World: Folk-Inspired Music for Guitar” (Teldec) earned her a 2001 Grammy, the first awarded a guitarist since Julian Bream’s in 1972. The next year, her recording of concertos she commissioned from Tan Dun and Christopher Rouse won another. Her latest release, “Baroque Favorites” (Warner Classics) with conductor Howard Griffiths and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, features elegant, nuanced performances of familiar music by Vivaldi, Albinoni and J.S. Bach in arrangements or transcriptions she has either made herself or overseen. Addressing the fact that none of the works on this disc were originally composed for guitar, Ms. Isbin notes that, “much Baroque music was conceived in terms of overall structure rather than particular instrumental sonorities.” Bach himself, she notes, arranged over 800 of his own works for a variety of instruments. For Ms. Isbin, “an important principle of making transcriptions or arrangements is that the piece should sound at least as good as, if not better than, it does in the original form.” A fundamental characteristic of Baroque music is its contrapuntal texture—i.e., with several melodic lines played against one another—as contrasted with the homophonic texture of classical style, with a single melody supported by an accompaniment. Ms. Isbin relishes the challenge of playing four- or five-voice Baroque counterpoint on the guitar. “You’re only using four fingers on the right hand and various configurations of the left, so you have to find ways to achieve the independence of the lines and the control that allows you to do so.” She attributes her present skill at it to the 10 years she spent studying with Ms. Tureck. “She’s not a guitarist, so as she imparted creative ideas about embellishment, articulation and dynamics, I had to find ways to realize them through guitar technique.” Indeed, every measure of “Baroque Favorites” bespeaks the abundant success of Ms. Isbin’s solutions to contrapuntal conundrums. |
 October 15, 2004 A pioneer in classical guitar, By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff “I didn’t set out to conquer the world,” says guitarist Sharon Isbin, who did just that. “I just wanted to become the best player I could be, myself, and a lot of things happened that I could never have predicted.” The honor roll of the 47-year-old guitarist’s accomplishments is long. She has commissioned and premiered major new works for her instrument; she has recorded more than 20 albums; she created the first guitar department at the Juilliard School of Music; she collaborated with the great Bach specialist Rosalyn Tureck in creating new editions of Bach for guitar; in 2001 she took home the first Grammy a classical guitarist had won in 30 years, and in 2002 she won another. Isbin has been on the cover of 31 magazines, and you can look at the glamorous images on her website, www.sharonisbin.com. Her next recording, of Joaquin Rodrigo’s perpetually popular Concierto de Aranjuez, along with concertos of Villa-Lobos and Ponce, with the New York Philharmonic, was made after the first concerts by a guitarist with the orchestra in 26 years and is its first-ever recording with a guitarist. On an advance copy she sounds glorious, playing with strong-backed rhythm and an astonishing spectrum of subtly shaded colors and dynamics. Isbin has a soft spot for Boston, and she has been coming here to play for most of her career—a cousin is the talk-show host and film critic David Brudnoy. She returns next week to play a concerto by Vivaldi, adapted from a lute piece, and the Rodrigo Concierto with Steven Lipsitt and the Boston Classical Orchestra in Faneuil Hall. Lipsitt met Isbin when they were students at Yale. “She reminds me of Yo-Yo Ma in this way—she could easily rest on her laurels and keep going around doing the same things over and over again. Instead she is constantly asking herself questions like ‘Why am I a musician?’ and ‘What else can I do?’ She has this voracious musical curiosity that feeds her imagination, and she is charismatic in all the best ways—she is really dedicated to establishing a connection to the audience. I love her playing because it is so elastic, so singing, so sensuous, so evocative, yet she can lock into a groove the way the great nonclassical guitarists do.” Isbin has played the Rodrigo Concierto “hundreds of times” since her first performance more than 30 years ago; she has recorded it three times. “I don’t remember the very first time I played it,” she says, “but one of the earliest ones was on a broadcast of a competition in Spain in 1979, and that led to my friendship with the composer, Joaquin Rodrigo, who had heard me on the radio and got in touch with me.” Isbin says the famous slow movement was written when Rodrigo’s wife had a miscarriage in 1939. “He couldn’t sleep at night after visiting her in the hospital; he sat at the piano and developed this beautiful theme full of of nostalgia, pain, and sadness. Even if you don’t know the story behind it, somehow you can hear that.” The piece has become one of the most performed, and recorded, concertos written in the 20th century, and it has traveled far beyond the guitar world. Miles Davis made a famous version of the slow movement, which Rodrigo later turned into a song with lyrics by his wife. Isbin performs the song on an album with mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer. Although the guitar is a quiet instrument, meant to be heard on a domestic scale and not built to project into a large, modern concert hall, audiences don’t have any trouble hearing Isbin. In recent years she has worked with a specially designed wireless sound-enhancement system, developed in large part by Roger Cane of Cane Audio Systems, that she sends ahead to each of her engagements. “I want the guitar to sound as if it were being played in someone’s living room,” she says. Isbin’s achievements loom even larger because she is the first woman to reach the top level of the solo classical guitar world. “The heritage of the instrument is in the folk world, and it has been popular in pop, bluegrass, and jazz,” she says. “From the ’60s on, teenage boys who played rock guitar shifted gears when they heard the classical guitar and liked it. Just how many young girls were playing rock guitar? Just how many are doing it now? I don’t think the ratio of male to female guitar students is going to change very fast—the vast majority of my students have been men, and with the exception of one student this year, none of the women has been American.” Always looking for new projects, for the last season Isbin has been playing a suite of folk tunes associated with Joan Baez, arranged for her by composer John Duarte. Early next year, at the Châtelet in Paris, she will play a new work that heavy-metal guitarist Steve Vai, a fan, has written to play with her. And she is excited to be making her debut in a television drama series—on an episode of Showtime’s “The L Word,” scheduled to air in March. “I play myself,” she says. “I play the guitar in a scene in the nightclub on the show called The Planet, but I also have some lines. There are only four of them—but they are good ones.” © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company |
 Sunday, July 22, 2001, Arts & Leisure Sharon Isbin Coolly Carries the Torch By Anne Midgette THERE’S something about the guitar that draws composers to local color. For Christopher Rouse, this means a “Concert de Gaudí” for guitar and orchestra that opens and closes with big flamenco flourishes, with swatches of bright, romantic orchestral color alternating with glissando effects evoking the organic, unexpected curves of the buildings of Antonio Gaudí, the great Catalan architect. And for Tan Dun, it means echoes of the pipa, the Chinese lute, in his guitar concerto, Yi2, which brandishes a panoply of whispering percussion, against which the guitar notes play like the plash of a waterfall in a Chinese garden. For Sharon Isbin, the guitarist who commissioned these two concertos and performs them on her latest recording for Teldec, local color could mean the many stations in the travels reflected in the titles of her discography, some 20 albums strong: “American Landscapes,” “Journey to the Amazon” and, of course, “Dreams of a World,” with music by composers from Israel to Greece and Venezuela, which won her the 2000 Grammy for best instrumental soloist without orchestra. There is even a hint of local color—an evocative atmosphere of place—in Ms. Isbin’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She has set the stage beautifully. A faint smell of incense mingles with the late afternoon sun falling on an array of travel souvenirs, and fresh cake waits on a low coffee table. On the floor under a desk in the foyer lies a large but tidy pile of papers and manuscripts. “That’s my next album,” she says, laughing. What’s not to like about Ms. Isbin? Nothing. First of all, she is a wonderful musician. People rightly describe her technique with adjectives like “impeccable” and “flawless.” In her hands the guitar takes on the precision of a diamond, each note a clear, shining facet that catches, prismlike, a glint of the spectrum. Her playing evokes Andrés Segovia’s observation that the classical guitar is “an orchestra seen through the wrong end of a telescope.” Ms. Isbin, 44, is also an attractive person, something documented on the covers of more than 24 magazines, which chronicle her development from long-haired Ivory Girl to an altogether more glamorous figure (all reproduced, along with critical accolades, on her meticulously tended Web site (www.sharonisbin.com). And she has been a fine, upstanding citizen of the music world. Her new album presents the latest of the nine concertos that she has commissioned, along with as many works again for solo guitar or chamber ensemble, from important composers like Joan Tower, Lukas Foss and John Corigliano. She has also made a significant pedagogical contribution, not least by establishing the guitar department at the Juilliard School in 1989. All these contributions are undeniable. So if Ms. Isbin projects an air of being keenly aware of them, and of carefully considering every aspect of her self-presentation, it is an understandable, though slightly distancing, part of the package. Being a classical guitarist still involves some pioneer work. The guitar remains the ultimate crossover instrument. Ubiquitous in folk and pop, it arrives in the classical concert milieu with a chip on its shoulder; a need to prove that it can measure up to its orchestral cousins in volume as well as quality; and a slender repertory that has to be supplemented not only with original compositions but also by forays into the repertories of other instruments. The perception of crossover sometimes lingers. “Dreams of a World” consists of original compositions; but because it bears the subtitle “Folk-Inspired Music for Guitar,” because the composers represent a deliberate sampling from different countries and because the music goes down as easily as a tray of hors d’oeuvres, to some people it smacks of world-music crossover. Yet it presents legitimate forays into folk idioms by serious composers like Mikis Theodorakis and Toru Takemitsu; and like flamenco, folk music is another strain of local color that tends to surface naturally in compositions for guitar. Ms. Isbin has had to proselytize, to an extent, from the beginning. She began guitar studies at 9 in Varese, Italy, where her father, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, had taken the family for his sabbatical. Her older brother had requested guitar lessons but backed out when he discovered that what the teacher, Aldo Minella, had to offer “wasn’t Elvis Presley or the Beatles,” Ms. Isbin says. She stepped in instead and took to the instrument so naturally that she was performing in public within a few years. But when she applied for her first competition, at 14, the real challenge was to convince the organizers that the guitar was a worthy vehicle. After that, she says, “the competition itself was almost easy.” Not surprisingly (or why bother to tell the tale?), she won. She has continued to beat her own path. Although she has worked with luminaries like Segovia and Rosalyn Tureck, the noted Baroque keyboard player and scholar (who had never had a guitar student before), her only regular teachers since the age of 16, as she tells it, have been “a mirror and a tape recorder.” Her 10 years of work with Ms. Tureck resulted in, among other things, definitive Schirmer publications of two Bach lute suites (BWV 996 and 997) for classical guitar, edited by Ms. Tureck and fingered by Ms. Isbin. In her accounts of these works in a Bach album on Virgin Classics, Ms. Isbin carefully follows the music’s tracery with a degree of subtlety and coloristic nuance that differentiates her interpretation from the flashier, highly individual performances of the great guitar pioneer and transcriber Segovia. In her apartment, she gets up to demonstrate on her instrument how her fingerings differ from Segovia’s, preserving the continuity of the many voices by keeping each, as much as possible, on different strings. This kind of care and hard work underlies every facet of Ms. Isbin’s career. She describes researching hundreds of Appalachian folk tunes for the piece that became John Duarte’s “Appalachian Dreams,” scouring local libraries and following up leads with local musicians at the same time that she was on tour, rehearsing and performing with the West Virginia Symphony. “When I put my mind to something,” Ms. Isbin says, “it’s not work.” Susanne Mentzer, the mezzo-soprano who appears with Ms. Isbin on the album “Wayfaring Stranger,” paints a portrait of their collaboration that supports this assertion. “We got together and went through stacks of music,” she says. “She has incredible knowledge of the repertory. She has such a good sense of folk music. A lot of these were her own arrangements. She spends a lot of time trying to make sure it’s perfect.” In the realm of commissions, this work ethic is a particularly good thing, since it takes a lot of work to get some composers to write for this unfamiliar instrument. Ms. Isbin issued her first commission at 17, when she was performing in Israel and heard a piece by Ami Maayani; she introduced the resulting Guitar Concerto in 1978. Not every commission comes easily. Mr. Corigliano required eight years of cajoling before he produced “Troubadours.” “I learned not to take no for an answer,” Ms. Isbin says. “TROUBADOURS”—a concerto in which the soloist strolls, troubadourlike, around the stage—has become one of the most-performed commissions in the guitarist’s repertory. And it was important in another way. To make sure that the guitar could be heard as she moved around the orchestra, Ms. Isbin used a concealed system of wireless amplification, which worked so well that she has been using it ever since. This seems simply another way of reaching, literally, a larger audience; Ms. Isbin isn’t even concerned with hiding it. Perhaps because the guitar has not been adapted, like the violin or the piano, to carry over an orchestra’s sonority, the miking “hasn’t been controversial,” she says. In fact, it is usually not detected. Even fellow guitarists have innocently complimented her after concerts on the size of her tone. Still, no one can argue with Ms. Isbin’s talent and technical prowess. And those qualities have gotten her into the vanguard of a field dominated by men, and helped her raise public awareness of her instrument with everything from a guitar series on National Public Radio to, of course, recognition of the guitar at Juilliard. They have also helped introduce a significant body of music to the repertory, not least the Rouse and Tan concertos—which, for all their evocation of local color, no one will confuse with crossover. So it may be natural that Ms. Isbin is anxious to document every step she has taken along the way, from her musical achievements to the photographs of her travels in the “Dreams of a World” CD booklet. Travel, after all, requires preparation. And one has a sense that whatever Ms. Isbin encounters along her path, she will be ready for it. |
 Friday, March 9, 2007 Something special Classical guitar master Sharon Isbin shines at Scott By Matthew Erikson, Star-Telegram Staff Writer FORT WORTH—How do we love guitarist Sharon Isbin? Let us count the ways. Thursday evening at Scott Theatre, Isbin was the featured performer for the Fort Worth Classic Guitar Society’s recital series, one that regularly brings in distinguished performers. Yet there’s something special about Isbin. As a woman in a male-dominated field, Isbin has been a trailblazer in more ways than most classical musicians could ever dream. Her teachers include the legendary Andres Segovia and piano doyenne Rosalyn Tureck. She’s the first guitarist to record with the New York Philharmonic. What’s more, Isbin has had no difficulty straddling the worlds of classical music and pop culture; her playing is on the soundtrack of the film The Departed. She won a Grammy in 2001 and has commissioned a whopping number of works for guitar. Three of those commissions—works by Leo Brouwer, John Duarte and Tan Dun—were heard in Thursday’s mostly Latin and folk-flavored program. Isbin’s artistry made every one of the assorted pieces shine. Impeccable voicing and a bell-like clarity added excitement to the samba rhythms of Isaias Savio’s Batucada, the evening’s curtain-raiser. Evocative narrative-inspired pieces by Gaudencio Thiago de Mello and Brouwer (his Black Decameron) displayed a gorgeous dynamic range and a gift for interpretative color. Isbin demonstrated a singer’s cantabile and supple phrasing throughout a lovely set of pieces by Spanish composers Granados, Tarrega and Albeniz. Duarte’s Joan Baez Suite and Tan’s Seven Desires for Guitar were testaments to Isbin’s versatility. They were also the most intriguing works of the evening. Baez’s folk-like strains were given polyphonic, richly hued treatment in Duarte’s touching work. Tan’s exotic music was brilliantly rendered with its percussive embellishments and strumming sounds simulating a Chinese lute. |
Click here to read the March 8, 2007 review
 Wednesday, May 30, 2001; 12:05 p.m. EDT By Josh L. Dickey, Associated Press Writer MINNEAPOLIS -- Calling all composers (and Eric Clapton): Ever wanted to write for the classical guitar? Sharon Isbin would like a word with you. She’s got world-class chops, a couple-dozen recordings, and a Grammy just out of the packing peanuts perched on the shelf in her New York City home. The award was a coup for the instrument itself: Richard Nixon was in office the last time a guitarist beat out a pianist for Best Instrumental Solo Performance (without orchestra). Isbin did it in February with her folk-inspired “Dreams of a World.” But while Isbin is among the world’s elite classical players, what really sets her apart is the dogged commissioning of new concerti for guitar and orchestra. “She’s created a stir, certainly,” said Jeff Van, head of the guitar department at the University of Minnesota’s School of Music and Isbin’s teacher while she was growing up in Minneapolis. “It’s not easy to get a new concerto into the repertoire,” Van said. “She’s done a lot to establish that with premieres and her recordings.” Score two more for Isbin on her latest recording, which hit stores this month: The first is “Concert de Gaudi” in four movements by Pulitzer Prize winning composer Christopher Rouse, a tribute to Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi’s surrealistic, melting ornamentation and organic forms. The second is “Yi2,” in five movements by Tan Dun (who took home an Academy Award this year for his score to the Taiwanese martial-arts juggernaut “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”). It draws its forms from Chinese ritual and folk music. Both concertos were recorded in live performances with the Gulbenkian Orchestra, based in Lisbon, Portugal. Isbin has previously commissioned the work of John Corigliano, who claimed the Pulitzer Prize for music this year with his Symphony No. 2 for string orchestra. Her Grammy, Tan Dun’s Oscar and Corigliano’s Pulitzer came “all within two months,” Isbin said with a bemused chuckle. “I feel fortunate to be in such company.” It’s especially impressive for a master of classical guitar, an instrument deep in the shadow of the piano and violin. “Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun were very eager to take on the challenge,” Isbin said, speaking by phone from her hotel room in Rome, where she was touring. “Tan Dun especially, because there’s such a rich tradition of the plucked instrument in Chinese culture.” “Eager” is not a word Isbin uses to describe most composers she approaches. “Very often it takes a lot of arm-twisting because guitar is a confounding instrument for composers that don’t play it,” she said, then added with a laugh: “I kind of play the role of the vulture. I single out my prey. It has to be someone whose music I really love, and it has to be someone whose previous work I know will fit in well with guitar.” One of the best things about composers’ lack of familiarity with her instrument, she said, is that it forces innovation. “I have to kind of play nursemaid to the process, and the fax machine really starts whirring,” she said. “But oftentimes this dialectic of interaction has worked for me because, really, every single piece that has been written for me has been written by composers with no preconceptions. So they allow their creativity to make extraordinary new discoveries.” The new works from Rouse and Tan Dun are a departure from Isbin’s folksy “Dreams of a World” and from “Journey to the Amazon,” her spicy cocktail of South American styles that was nominated last year for a Grammy for Best Classical Crossover Album. Both “Concert de Gaudi” and “Yi2” are flecked with flamenco, and Isbin occasionally flavors the traditionally percussive stew by stomping her feet and slapping the body of her guitar. But there the familiar forms end; the rest of the record is, for the most part, eerie, modern and polychromatic, with quizzical, Igor Stravinsky-inspired figures bending conventional melody and rhythm. “It’s a much more modern experience, one which transforms you, with a very grand, very mysterious, mystical sort of feel,” Isbin said. She attacks the opening of “Concert de Gaudi” with a Spanish flourish backed by orchestral overtures before ascending into more airy, modern themes. “Yi2” (pronounced Y-I-two) mourns and wails, evoking Chinese funeral rituals. Isbin’s mimicry of the pipa, a traditional Chinese stringed instrument, was terra incognita for the guitarist who’s always looking for new worlds of music to explore. “Tan Dun likes to take a modern instrument, and with that, evoke an ancient one,” Isbin said. “It’s his style to draw on the resources of both. With the Spanish guitar that I play, he was able to produce an extraordinary synthesis.” Isbin’s virtuosity has been her freedom to dabble in many styles. “If Eric Clapton called me up and said, let’s do a duet, I’d be just delighted,” she said. “I like good music, and to me there are no boundaries to what it is.” |
 June 2001 - Connoisseur’s World By Robin Tabachnik The classical guitar kingdom is a small but rich corner of the musical world, owing much of its wealth to a svelte beauty named Sharon Isbin. She plays at least sixty concerts a year, and her repertoire embraces folk, jazz and Latin pieces, in addition to works by the likes of Bach, de Falla and Granados. “I no longer think of music in terms of categories,” she explains, “just wonderful pieces that excite and touch me.” 
They excite the critics too. Isbin’s CD DREAMS OF A WORLD (Teldec) not
only displaced The 3 Tenors: Paris 1998 from near the top of the
classical-music charts last year; it won a Grammy award in February—the
first won by a classical guitarist in almost thirty years. Besides
playing, Isbin somehow finds time to serve as head of the guitar
department at the Juilliard School in New York and to give master
classes at the Aspen Music Festival and School.When the Minnesota-born Isbin took up the guitar at age nine, her natural talent shone. She honed it through prodigious study; among her teachers were the legendary Andrés Segovia and the famed keyboardist Rosalyn Tureck. So expert has Isbin become that she often uses a custom-made wireless amplification system that lets the softest guitar phrase soar above the largest orchestra. “Without losing nuance, I can maintain an enormous dynamic range that sounds so natural,” she explains. The Isbin sound is a symphony unto itself, all raw emotion, dazzling technique and a kaleidoscope of tonal colors that led one critic to call her “the Monet of the classical guitar.” Some of her most interesting performances are of works she has commissioned from top composers—Christopher Rouse, Tan Dun, Lukas Foss, Ned Rorem and John Corigliano among them. “First I have to get the composer to say yes,” Isbin smiles. “Then I have to find the funding and the orchestra. And the rest is up to me.” |
 JUNE 1996 Sharon Isbin, unplugged
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February 13, 2001 - Page D03 - Music Review By Michael Manning, Globe Correspondent Sometime after the ’60s, the guitar replaced the piano as the most widely abused instrument. But the upside of that spike in interest was a small group of American guitarists, now enjoying the full maturity of middle age, who’ve inspired a significant new guitar repertoire while bringing the instrument, with its old repertoire intact, into the 21st century. Principal among these artists is Sharon Isbin, whose FleetBoston Celebrity Series recital took place Saturday night in Jordan Hall. Isbin’s artistry thwarts the kind of analytical listening that usually informs notices like this. This listener found such analysis trivial in the face of the overwhelming humanity and emotionality of Isbin’s playing. To be clear, I’m not talking about turgid, hyperbolic sentiment, nor am I suggesting in any way a paucity of intelligence or the supplanting of coherence with impulse. Neither is it implied that Isbin is anything less than a traditional virtuosa. It’s just that her playing connects in ways that are deeply instinctual and natural, drawing one into the moment like the best storytelling does. One garners feelings from her playing—not abstractions of emotion, but nameable feelings such as melancholy, nostalgia, and happiness. If there’s a warhorse in the guitar’s repertoire, it’s Francisco Tarrega’s trembling portrait of a medieval Spanish citadel, “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” Isbin’s performance was full of the remembrance that the title explicitly names. Enrique Granados’s Spanish Dance No. 5 is another well-worn concert morsel. Originally written for piano, its braying grace notes and need for licentious rubato and quick shifts of color make it guitar piece nearly perfect for virtuosi like Isbin. Of late, Isbin has been collaborating with the Brazilian percussionist Gaudencio Thiago de Mello, with whom she shared half of this program. On a range of instruments, from rainsticks to turtle shells to ceramic jugs to what appeared simply to be a wooden box, de Mello produced extraordinary sounds. He’s one of those percussionists who constantly plays melody; he shapes rhythms with the sensibilities of a poet, coloring like an instrumentalist, phrasing like a singer. It’s sufficient to say of his compositions that they are beautiful. But they’re also gentle, hypnotic, bewitching, and beguiling—stylistically crossing Antonio Carlos Jobim with Paul Winter. Just to hear the elaborate, polytonal song of the rare Amazonian bird uirapuru, woven by tape into one of his pieces, would have redeemed the entire evening. But the evening comprised so much more than individual moments, achieving what few events of any kind do—meaning. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company |
 May 30, 2000 By John von Rhein , Chicago Tribune Music Critic Speaking with Sharon Isbin, you can almost hear her pulling sensuous colors from her guitar. The artist whom one critic has called ‘the Monet of the guitar’ talks in the melodious cadences of that instrument. The rich play of emotions and moods, the suppleness and beauty of phrasing, that she brings to a Bach lute suite or a Spanish fandango are there as she talks of her life and art. One of the world’s preeminent virtuosos of the classical guitar, Isbin is the first woman to reach the pinnacle of the solo guitar world. For her, it’s a world without boundaries. She has commissioned more new concertos for the instrument than any living guitarist. She has jammed with jazz legend Herb Ellis, Spanish guitar master Laurindo Almeida and bluesman Rory Block. She has explored Appalachian folk music and recorded a Grammy-nominated ‘tour’ of the Amazon rain forest. She has published an edition of the Bach lute suites with renowned Bach specialist Rosalyn Tureck. And she heads the guitar department she created at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. The glamorous guitarist even maintains a Web site, www.sharonisbin.com, where you can hear snippets from her albums and peruse 22 magazine covers, each bearing a different color portrait of her. She has attracted a devoted following on both sides of the crossover fence, including pop singer Melissa Etheridge, with whom she jammed at a recent party. ‘I just love all styles of music that are of good quality. Around every corner, I keep finding new musical worlds I want to be involved in,’ says Isbin. She will share the music she has discovered in some of those worlds in a solo recital Saturday evening at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston. Her program will include selections from her albums ‘Dreams of a World’ and ‘Journey to the Amazon.’ The Minnesota-born Isbin was fortunate to have been able to take lessons with Andrés Segovia, the Spanish master guitarist who did more than anyone to legitimize the classical guitar as a concert instrument during the last century. But her actual role model was Ida Presti, the French guitarist who, before dying in her early 40s, was the leading woman guitarist of an earlier generation. Indeed, it’s the lack of female role models in this country that is responsible for the solo guitar having attracted relatively few women players, Isbin contends. She also points to how the classical guitar tradition originated in Spanish flamenco music, whose tradition is muy macho. ‘Flamenco may be sung or danced by a woman, but the guitarist is almost always a man. Also, most of the people of my generation who came to the guitar were teenage boys who were enamored of rock music and played electric guitar. They heard Segovia recordings and thought, This is kind of cool, and switched over to classical guitar. Since girls really didn’t play in rock bands, that transfer didn’t happen for them.’ Even so, Isbin reports that the guitar classes she has taught during the past 10 years at Juilliard have attracted men and women players from 15 different countries—though no female guitarists as yet from the United States. Because there are fewer mainstream works for guitar and orchestra than any other mainstream instrument, Isbin feels a particular responsibility to increase the guitar repertory. To date she has commissioned nine concerti, as well as solo and chamber works, from major composers including John Corigliano, Lukas Foss, Joseph Schwantner, Aaron Jay Kernis, Joan Tower, David Diamond and Ned Rorem. In Lisbon she recently recorded her two newest commissions—concertos by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun—with the Gulbenkian Foundation Orchestra under Chinese conductor Muhai Tang. The disc will be released by Teldec this fall. Her dedication to contemporary music has not only added some important new pieces to the guitar’s relatively slim catalogue, but it also has fired the imagination of composers and obliged her, in turn, to expand her technique to meet their musical demands. Her most successful commission has been Corigliano’s ‘Troubadours.’ Since the premiere in 1993 with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Isbin has played the concerto well over 40 times and recorded it. She is scheduled to perform it in Chicago in May 2001 with Symphony II, on the same program as the most popular staple of the modern repertory, Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto de Aranjuez.’ It took Isbin eight years to persuade Corigliano to write the work. ‘He didn’t agree until I presented him with the idea of the courtly, romantic French troubadours of 13th Century and suggested that I be the strolling troubadour who interacts with members of the orchestra.’ Making the guitar audible, first from offstage, later when she moved around the stage, required a special means of sound enhancement. Isbin had two of her colleagues at Juilliard design a hidden, wireless sound system. It proved so successful that she has used it for all her solo and concerto appearances since 1994 (see www.caneaudiosystems.com). The electronically reinforced sound is as natural and unobtrusive as if you were hearing her play in your living room, the guitarist insists. ‘I used it a few years ago when I played with the Chicago Sinfonietta at Orchestra Hall. A number of guitarists came backstage afterward and exclaimed, ‘My God, you’ve got a loud guitar. The sound is incredible!’ They had no idea it had been reinforced.’ She says the portable sound system—she remains the only major classical guitarist who uses one—has revolutionized her career. ‘This way, the audience can feel the energy of the instrument and I can enjoy performing more, because I don’t have to struggle to be heard, especially when I’m up against an entire orchestra. I can do everything I have in my mind and know it will come across.’ Isbin got hooked on the guitar at 9, when her father, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, took the family on a sabbatical to Italy. Her oldest brother expressed an interest in guitar lessons, and their parents arranged for him to study with an Italian pupil of Segovia’s. ‘When he realized this was classical guitar, not Elvis Presley or the Beatles, he bowed out and I volunteered, not having any idea of what the classical guitar was,’ says Isbin. The resonance of the guitar, the sensual contact of fingers against the strings—everything about the instrument appealed to her at once. Although Isbin owns and plays several guitars, her preferred instrument is a Isbin, who this season has performed more than 60 concerts in America alone, apart from those she’s done in Europe and Japan, says she uses transcendental meditation to boost her ‘mental stamina’ and help her access her ‘inner creative powers.’ ‘Basically, my goal in playing is to become so immersed in the music that nothing else exists except the energy I’m feeling from people and the connections I’m making to the composers and their languages and emotions. That’s why it’s important I choose music I believe in, music that speaks to me.’ And while the guitarist had to give up her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, she has made it to the heavens nonetheless. Astronaut Chris Hadfield took one of her CDs, ‘American Landscape,’ into space in 1995 as a present for a Russian cosmonaut who is an amateur guitarist himself. Life and art in celestial harmony. That’s so Sharon Isbin. |
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June 5, 2000 Sharon Isbin at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall A journey of a thousand colors begins with the artistry By John von Rhein Chicago Tribune Music Critic If the critic James Gibbons Huneker were still around to write his inimitable critical prose, he would call Sharon Isbin a pianississimist. She gets nuances out of the classical guitar few guitarists since Segovia have matched. Everything she performs bespeaks perfect technical control yet suggests spontaneous improvisation-the art that conceals art. Her instrument speaks with a thousand colors and those colors were marvelously arrayed at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall on Saturday night, when the American guitar virtuoso presented a recital to close the season’s Segovia Classical Guitar series, sponsored by the Northwestern University School of Music and the Chicago Classical Guitar Society. The guitar is an intimate instrument, one much better suited to a private salon than a large concert hall. Through her formidable artistry and with the help of her custom-built wireless sound reinforcement system, Isbin succeeded in striking a happy medium. Even when her playing sank to a confidential whisper, her tone had body and impact, and she was free to commune with the audience through her music. No guitarist is more eager to embrace the many worlds that the classical guitar can bridge. Isbin’s program, including selections from two of her Teldec albums, ‘Dreams of a World’ and ‘Journey to the Amazon,’ offered an engaging tour of classical and folk music. The guitarist ventured from the Brazilian rainforest to Venezuela, Cuba, Spain, Israel and the Appalachian Mountains. Her artistry is such that she spoke every musical dialect like a native. Raptly engaged in her playing as much as in her spoken introductions to each piece, the audience clearly enjoyed the ride. The subtleties of her soft dynamics required a degree of close concentration from her listeners, which I’m happy to report they gave her. Her obviously deep love of the instrument and its traditions is matched by her flawless intonation, clarity of articulation and ability to spin a warm singing line as subtly and sensitively as any classical recital singer. Rhythmic urgency and a command of a vast color palette seem second nature to her. In Tarrega’s ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra’ (Memories of the Alhambra) she kept the melody distinct over an accompaniment suggesting multiple strummed guitars. Her playing was positively hypnotic in Granados’ ‘Leyenda’ (WFMT’s familiar signature music), whose ostinato figure she traced in a crescendo of gathering intensity. The South American portion of her world tour was particularly noteworthy because of the unfamiliar composers and pieces it turned up. Isbin sang tenderly (Antonio Lauro’s ‘Waltz No. 3, Natalia’) before launching into an infectiously spirited Brazilian samba by Isaias Savio (‘Batucada’) such as one might encounter during carnival time. I would like to have heard the ‘rainforest’ percussion obbligato to Guadencio Thiago de Mello’s ‘Uirapuru do Amazonas’ but was delighted to discover the piece so beautifully played in solo form. Isbin has worked with numerous composers to bring new music into the world, and three such works—music written for her or arranged by her—were included in her program. Leo Brouwer’s absorbing ‘The Black Decameron’ (1981) seasons Afro-Cuban melodies and rhythms with some mild harmonic spice. Isbin’s arrangements of four songs by the Israeli composer Naomi Shemer—her country’s troubadour poet—pay heartfelt tribute to the soil and soul of a people. Best of all was British composer John Duarte’s five-part suite ‘Appalachian Dreams’ (1996), settings of nine folk songs that cover an extraordinary range of timbres, textures and moods, including a down-and-dirty bluegrass-guitar treatment of ‘Darling Cora.’ All three works were splendidly played, as was Granados’ Spanish Dance No. 5, played as an encore. |
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Sunday, February 14, 1999 - Page N2 - Arts and Film In the Tradition: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff More than 20 years ago, David Brudnoy called up to say, ‘I have this cousin who plays the guitar.’ The answer shot back too fast: ‘Who doesn’t?’ I didn’t know then that Brudnoy’s cousin was Sharon Isbin. In 1975 she had already won major competitions in Toronto and in Munich; later in that decade she played a wonderful Boston debut recital in First and Second Church and appeared with the Brandenburg Ensemble in Symphony Hall. Since then, Isbin has become one of the world’s most celebrated guitarists—and the first woman to enter the top rank of solo guitarists. Today Isbin has more than 20 CDs to her credit, plays 60 concerts in America every year (and more in Europe and Japan), and heads the guitar department she created at the Juilliard School in New York. One of her CDs has traveled into outer space, and she has her own Web site (www.sharonisbin.com) where you can see a picture of her CD floating weightless. This afternoon at 3, Isbin returns to Boston to play Joaquin Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra under Gisele Ben-Dor in Sanders Theatre. There she will also perform one of the many guitar concertos she has commissioned, ‘Troubadours,’ by John Corigliano. She has also agreed to play a free half-hour ‘aperitif’ concert at 2 before the main event; she will play selections from her best-selling, Grammy Award nominated CD ‘Journey to the Amazon.’ Speaking by phone from New York last week, Isbin talked about her career and her commitment to new music; she speaks with the vigor, the color, the emotional investment she brings to her playing. She says she had no intention of becoming a guitarist. ‘My father, who is now retired, was a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota; my mother’s side of the family was full of musicians and theater people. I was planning to be a scientist and spent hours dissecting anything that leaped or crawled. I also spent many hours a day on model rockets. When I was 9, our family went on sabbatical to Italy. My oldest brother expressed an interest in taking guitar lessons, but what he had in mind was Elvis Presley. What was available was classical guitar lessons, so I volunteered, not really having any idea of what the classical guitar was. I loved it immediately because it was so exotic, so out of my immediate world, and also because it was so very personal. The resonance spoke to me right away, the contact of fingers against the strings—there was something very sensual about it. After all, you cradle the guitar almost like a human being. This was something very different from my previous experience with the piano.’ Isbin’s talent was immediately apparent. Fortunately, she came along in time to take some lessons with the legendary Andres Segovia, who created an honored place for the guitar in the concert world. ‘I had a number of lessons with Segovia when he would come to town, and I also traveled to take lessons with him. He was not known for being a great teacher—his approach was to say, ‘Do it like I do it.’ But what was nice was to hear his sound up close. It was so especially beautiful and remarkable, something to strive for.’ Unfortunately, Isbin was never able to hear in live performance the most prominent woman guitarist of an earlier generation, Ida Presti, who played as half of the famous duo-guitar team with Alexandre Lagoya. ‘Ida Presti died in her early 40s, so I never heard her, but she was one of the finest guitarists ever to be produced in France, and she was a role model for me. In France, far more women study guitar than in the United States—I’m sure that the many years of her prominence encouraged that. Today some of my top students have been women. If I ever encountered any prejudice, I wasn’t consciously aware of it. Of course, when I would show up for a master class and there would be 40 to 50 male guitarists there, I was very aware of pressure. But that had a positive effect on me—it made me work harder. I didn’t want there to be any question about the quality of what I was offering. Nurturing my talent like that laid aside any question anyone might have. Ultimately you are in competition with yourself, and with no one else.’ The Rodrigo ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ is the most popular guitar concerto, and one of the most widely performed 20th-century concertos composed for any instrument. Written in 1939, it has been with Isbin throughout her career, and she prizes her personal association both with the piece and its composer, who is 97. ‘When I won a competition in 1979 in Spain, Rodrigo heard about it and tracked me down. I met him and his wife and forged a friendship that has lasted ever since. This is a man, blind since the age of 3, who changed the future of the guitar.’ The story behind the piece explains why it has so powerful an effect. ‘Rodrigo’s wife was expecting her first child, but had had a miscarriage; she was hospitalized, and he didn’t know whether she would live or die,’ Isbin says. ‘He had already begun work on the concerto. Every night he’d return from visiting her, devastated, and sit at the piano; what emerged was a beautiful theme for the second movement—he was remembering their honeymoon, in the Aranjuez, so the music is a mixture of passion for their love and of intense pain and loss. She didn’t die until last year, which was devastating to him; he is touched by some kind of cosmic grace—he has such a potent connection to his emotions.’ Isbin has forged her own emotional connection to this piece. ‘Two and a half years ago, when my brother was dying of AIDS, he said he wanted my recording of the second movement of this piece played at his memorial service. This sent me into shock—two days later I was scheduled to play just that movement with the Baltimore Symphony. I wondered how I was ever going to get through it, but it went as if he had commanded it. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life, and now I have that association whenever I play this music.’ Isbin has been interested in extending the repertory for her instrument since she was a teenager. In the 1980s, she embarked on a collaboration with the eminent Bach pianist Rosalyn Tureck that revolutionized the way Bach is interpreted on the guitar, and the two women collaborated on an edition of Bach’s lute suites. Isbin has also commissioned many new works for the guitar—including pieces by Aaron Jay Kernis, Lukas Foss, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Ned Rorem, David Diamond, and Bruce McCombie. ‘In terms of number of performances, John Corigliano’s ‘Troubadours’ is probably the most successful to date—since the premiere at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in 1993, I have played it more than 40 times, and people always love it. It was inspired by the courtly love tradition of the French troubadours, and the piece is conceived as a song by a woman troubadour. It evokes the spirit of the past, a return to childhood innocence, but it is also steeped in sadness and nostalgia because of what happened to the troubadours when they fell out of favor.’ Isbin plays an 11-year-old guitar made by Thomas Humphrey in New York. ‘What I like about it is the projection, the very round and full treble, and the ability to respond quickly to different timbre changes. How each note sustains is critical—lyrical playing depends on evenness and balance, the sustain, and the intonation.’ In the Corigliano work, the guitar is first heard offstage, and Isbin must play it while moving around. To make that happen, she had to take a step in a new direction. ‘I knew that the sound would require electronic reinforcement, but I wanted to control the quality of the reinforcement, so that it would sound so natural that nobody would know it was there. That required something that no one could see, so it is a wireless sound system. I began to use it not only for ‘Troubadors’ but also for other concertos and solo dates. It gives the listener the depth, resonance, and roundness of the guitar sound and it sounds as natural as if it were in a living room. The contexts in which most people hear the guitar are very different—in the living room, on a recording, or in a concert hall. What is important to me onstage is that the sound of the instrument should have all the intimacy, the nuances, the wide dynamic range you would hear in a living room or on a recording.’ Isbin says she is the only guitarist so far who has the system. ‘It is a pain in the neck to travel with because it weighs 94 pounds in its shipping case. But it has revolutionized my career. It has not proved controversial—quite the opposite. Critics who had no idea it was there write about how easily my unamplified guitar filled the hall! It’s not much fun for a performer to struggle to be heard; this way the audience can feel the energy of the instrument. I’ve had the system for six years now, and since I’ve had it, I enjoy performing a lot more—I can do everything I have in my mind, and know it will come across.’ |
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BOOKINGS: Columbia Artists PRESS: Jay K. Hoffman |
Updated 6/26/2009 by Stephen Linhart Copyright Isbin, Linhart Button Photo: O’Shields |
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