{"id":7165,"date":"2017-06-22T02:12:14","date_gmt":"2017-06-22T09:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=7165"},"modified":"2017-06-28T15:55:29","modified_gmt":"2017-06-28T22:55:29","slug":"kanengiser-tolonen-and-a-lute-oh-my-report-from-gfa-pt-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/kanengiser-tolonen-and-a-lute-oh-my-report-from-gfa-pt-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Kanengiser, Tolonen, and a Lute (Oh My)! Report from GFA, Pt. 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Blair Jackson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Greetings from the GFA<\/a> convention in toasty Fullerton (Orange County), California! The six-day event, which is being held on the very-modern campus of California State University Fullerton (home of the \u201cTitans,\u201d who were, sadly, eliminated from the prestigious College World Series baseball tournament the day GFA started), and was already in full-swing when I arrived on Tuesday afternoon. I was sorry to miss the opening night concert by last year\u2019s GFA winner Xavier Jara. It was hotter than Hades as I panted my way across the broiling campus, but who should be standing out in the heat greeting stragglers like me and generally looking like he didn\u2019t have a care in the world, but Andrew York, who, along with Martha Masters, are \u201chosts\u201d for this year\u2019s confab. As southern Californians, they\u2019re used to the heat. We northern Californians are famous for being weather wimps; guilty as charged!.<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, after getting my badge, I scoped out the maze of rooms in the university\u2019s sprawling Clayes Performing Arts Center, where there was a luthier\/guitar products expo in three separate rooms, lecture halls, and a couple of different recital\/performance spaces serving the guitar competitions and the many concerts. My first stop was the Tuesday afternoon round of the preliminaries in the recital hall. As always, the general level of playing was impressively high. This year\u2019s required specially commissioned piece was a rather abstract,dissonant, and demanding (for both listener and guitarist) work by Jeffrey Holmes called Herjan<\/em>. Personally I find it very difficult to evaluate whether this kind of piece is played \u201cwell,\u201d but after hearing it half a dozen times, I think I had some<\/em> handle on it, and the players who seemed strongest throughout their programs were also the ones who performed the Holmes piece with the greatest confidence. Of the players I saw that afternoon, I was most impressed with Ami Inoi of Japan and Bogdan Mihailescu of Bulgaria, but I don\u2019t get a vote (luckily for everyone!). As I write this I have no idea who will be playing in the semi-finals on Thursday.<\/p>\n

(One side note: This was the first time I\u2019d seen a competitor abruptly stop his own performance: After trying to find his footing, so to speak, several times, he meekly said, \u201cI can\u2019t\u2026\u201d and left the stage. It was heartbreaking to see, because we all know how much goes into preparing for a competition like this, only to have it, apparently, fall apart because of nerves. He left the stage to compassionate applause from everyone there. I hope he makes it back to the stage another day!)<\/p>\n

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Not too exciting from the outside, but the music was great inside.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Around the World with Bill Kanengiser
\n<\/strong>As one of the main movers-and-shakers in the southern California classical guitar scene (co-founder of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet; associate professor of guitar at USC; board member of the GFA, etc.) William Kanengiser found himself in a very friendly “home” environment at his wonderful and very well-attended Tuesday night concert at the Little Theatre. Talk about eclectic: The first half consisted of Turina’s Fantasia (Sevillana)<\/em>, Sor’s incredibly moving and beautiful Fantasie Elegiaque, Op. 59<\/em> (my personal highlight of the evening), Handel’s jaunty Suite No. 11 in D minor<\/em>, and Ernesto Garcia de Le\u00f3n’s appealing three-part Sonata No. 1 ‘Las Campanas.’<\/em><\/p>\n

The music after the intermission was like a world tour: Bogdanovic’s Three African Sketches <\/em>included a movement in which Kanengiser’s “prepared” guitar (staples on the strings near the bridge?) had a rattly metal sound like a mbira (he said “kora,” but it was less like that sound to me); the seven-part The Barber of Baghdad<\/em> (based on a story from 1001 Arabian Nights<\/em>) took us to Persia and other parts of the Middle East; and Dror Yikro<\/em> has its origin in storied Jewish culture. After performing Bryan Johanson’s aptly named Magic Serenade<\/em>, he closed with two pieces from Sketches for Friends<\/em> by composer\/GFA artistic director Brian Head, the second of which, Brookland Boogie<\/em>, is based around the memorable main riff of Miles Davis’ So What; <\/em>very cool! What a fun and engaging program!<\/p>\n

Below, Kanengiser plays <\/em>Three African Sketches a while back.<\/em>
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