Wigmore Hall review and Scottish Chamber Orchestra questions
New post, just realised that my last one didn’t have much to do with music. So here’s a picture of my guitar case with gratuitous pixlr-o-mat usage.
Ok ok ok serious face.
This month there was a review of my Wigmore Hall debut in Classical Guitar Magazine.
Just for the record, during the concert the amplification was not turned on by the sound engineer – no idea why that happened so apologies.
There’s also a small promo feature in the SCO blog about the performances of the Concierto de Aranjuez next week:
We are looking forward to your performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez on tour with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in September. Why do you think it is such a popular piece?
I’m looking forward to it too xD It’s memorable, the Adagio especially – almost too memorable… It’s popular with the audience because it’s beautiful, with epic cowboys chucked in too. Also, in all fairness, it’s probably the only guitar concerto they have ever heard and it’s certainly the only one I’ve ever been asked to play.
This tour sees you make your SCO debut. What are you most looking forward to about performing with the Orchestra and about the tour in particular?
Because I love the SCO hahahahhahahaaaaaa I really really do and was so flattered and shocked and happy when I received the invitation, you genuinely are my favourite orchestra in Scotland and I’m not just saying that to brown nose. Although obviously I’m still brown nosing.
The classical repertoire for guitar is somewhat smaller than for other instruments, how does that affect you as a musician?
We generally lack the top tier of compositions. The trouble with guitarists is not even that we have so much mediocre music – it’s not even that we compose a lot of mediocre music – it’s that so many guitarists choose to play this mediocre music. I mean, some guitar music is nice, some is pretty and some is even beautiful. But when we reduce ourselves to playing, as we so often do, Romance by whoever the snot wrote it (actually just boring, only 2 chords in the whole piece) or Recuerdos de la Alhambra (pretty) then we’re obviously not going to be taken seriously. So we have to pick the beautiful, complex ones. So Bach and renaissance and a bunch of 20th century Bream commissions. And hope and try to do it well. In playing the best musics that we have and arranging them from whatever we can scrape, we can endeavor to better our own music making.
You act as your own agent! What is that like?
Busy.
And finally, I bought a cats paw for my hands, exercise this way may do them good? Anyway apparently cats paw was also the name of a torture device very similar to the spanish tickler used during the inquisition.
Can’t actually tell the difference myself, but the experts say blah blah blah. Who am I to disagree?
Have a nice Sunday evening folks
More concerts on upcoming events page
There are more concerts now up on the concert diary page, check it out if you fancy 
Press release link and various others of mostly the same thing
Here is a press release written by the ROSL, seems the win is featuring on this website and this website, I have the date of my Wigmore Hall debut up on the upcoming concerts page as the 11th of June 2012. I’ve also updated the quotes page with the kind words of Alan Coady.
EDIT: + 1 moar in teh Scotsman
