13 April 2023

Iberia and thereabouts

Classical guitar is a different stringed instrument.  It's fretted, to start with, and there's little that's fretted since the baroque era and that's with moveable gut.  Thus its tone is sharp and intonation is precise.  Also, it seems so associated with Spain so even when playing Bach and Pachelbel I hear strains of Iberia.  Connor Whyte performed at Wesley yesterday on classical guitar.  He's a worthy player, award winner (2022 Adelaide International Guitar Competition, no less) and now an honours student at the ANUSOM.  His program was baroque (Bach and Pachelbel) and Spanish (Rodrigo and Sor) so it confirmed all my expectations.  But so what for my expectations.  The music was wonderfully detailed and delicate, imaginative given his own arrangements for Bach and Pachelbel, intensely dynamic to the lowest of volumes that had you craning in your seat.  The baroque stuff worked a treat and the skills were to die for, blistering scales and double stops and thumb and finger picks and thumb playing a low quarter-note melody against sixteenth-note finger picking, hammers-on and harmonics and some dissonance from the recent works.  And all from memory.  Just a huge pleasure.

Connor Whyte (guitar) performed Bach, Pachelbel, Rodrigo and Sor at Wesley.

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