When I was quite young I did a very smart thing and went to Spain for a year to study guitar. At the time, there were almost no qualified classical guitar teachers in Canada. I had been studying with one of them in Vancouver and one day he told me I should study with his teacher in Alicante, Spain, José Tomás. While there I met a terrific Japanese guitarist, Masahiro Umemoto, who won the competition that year. There was quite an international community of guitar students around Maestro Tomás including ones from Canada, the US, Japan, the Philippines, Finland, Belgium, the UK, Peru, Mexico and other places. I later realized that I had been lucky enough to be in the very best place on earth to study guitar at that moment in time. I just noticed that Masahiro has a YouTube channel. I encourage you to go have a listen.
THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
Nice to hear the Weiss Fantasy played with a full range of bass notes. I'd love to play one of those ten-stringers, must be fun.
ReplyDeleteI get the impression that 60s/70s/80s was a great time to be a classical guitarist? Or at least, it's a sentiment among those I know of a certain generation.
Masahiro is following the example of our teacher, Jose Tomas, and is playing an 8 string guitar. Tomas was a great advocate of the music of S. L. Weiss and eight strings is enough to span the needed bass notes.
ReplyDeleteI think the classical guitar world went through a great expansion from the 60s to the 80s but then the classical music field in general started narrowing and there were fewer and fewer possible engagements every year. I'm speaking of North America, I think it was different in Europe.
Ah, well I'd love to play an eight-stringer too. It occurs to me I've never heard any Jose Tomas recordings so I just looked him on YT - there are surprisingly few recordings, but all fine and sensitive performances, as expected, with that lovely old, full (though rather crackly) record sound. It's particularly pleasing to hear him play a couple of Almains by Robert Johnson (the video erroneously says they are by Dowland), a lute-composer I love very much, yet seldom played on guitar...
ReplyDeleteI think Tomas was the main advocate of the 8 string guitar--much less clumsy than the 10 string one that Yepes favoured. He really played a lot of early music along with the usual Segovia standards. Of the close circle of Segovia students, Oscar Ghiglia, Alirio Diaz, John Williams, Tomas was the only one that did not pursue a big performing career. His strength was as a teacher. He had me playing a lot of Spanish vihuela pieces in the first few months.
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