Guitar Discovery at the Manhattan School of Music

Press release
Source: Julia Crowe

Guitar Discovery, a festival of new and unusual music, will take place on Sunday, September 24, Wednesday, September 27 and Thursday, September 28, 2006, each night at 7:30 p.m. at the Manhattan School of Music's Greenfield Hall. Admission is free, with no tickets required (early arrival is recommended). The festival features guitar faculty members Oren Fader, David Leisner and Mark Delpriora, with Leisner also serving as the festival's Artistic Director. Each program is distinctive and alluring.

Oren Fader kicks off the festival on Sunday, the 24th with a fresh program of "New Music for the Classical and Electric Guitar", featuring many works written for him or for chamber groups with which he performs. Some older masters are represented, like Elliot Carter, Charles Wuorinen and Louis Andriessen (with his rarely performed, but highly regarded Hout for tenor saxophone, electric guitar, piano, and marimba ). And younger or lesser-known composers complete the program - Lois Vierk, Dusan Bogdanovic, Martin Rokeach, Gal Ziv, John Mayrose, Pedro Silva, Sidney Corbett and Marco Oppediasano. Guest artists include guitarist William Anderson and members of the Fireworks Ensemble.

David Leisner continues the festival on Wednesday, the 27th with a solo program devoted to one composer, "Wenzeslaus Matiegka (1773-1830), the Beethoven of the Guitar". This Czech-born composer, who lived most of his life in Vienna in the era of Beethoven and Schubert, has been unduly neglected until now. Leisner believes that it won't be long before Matiegka is newly regarded as one of the most important guitar composers of the 19th century. The 11 solo sonatas that are known to exist, as well as all of the chamber music, are generously proportioned and show a masterful command of the grand scale. In addition, his music reveals a complexity of counterpoint, richness of harmonic progression, musical imagination and invention, and above all, a forward-moving sense of development that easily surpasses, in Leisner's opinion, all of his guitar contemporaries. Leisner will soon record this program in the studio for his next solo album on the Azica label.

Mark Delpriora finishes up the festival on Thursday, the 28th with a stimulating solo program devoted to recently discovered "Music from the Andres Segovia Archives", featuring a treasure trove of material written for, but never performed by, Andres Segovia. Much of this program was written during Segovia's years in Paris during the 1920's and is lightly modernistic in style. Two larger works by Federico Moreno-Torroba and Cyril Scott are accompanied by shorter pieces by Gaspar Cassado, Pierre-Octave Ferroud, Alys Fornerod, Henri Martelli, and Vicente Arregui. Listeners will surely be surprised by the high quality of this music that was overlooked by Segovia.

Festival Schedule
Sunday, September 24, 8 pm: Oren Fader, "New Music for the Classical and Electric Guitar"
Wednesday, September 27, 7:30 pm: David Leisner, "Wenzeslaus Matiegka, the Beethoven of the Guitar"
Thursday, September 28, 7:30 pm: Mark Delpriora, "Music from the Segovia Archives"

All concerts are in Greenfield Hall, Manhattan School of Music, Broadway and 122nd St. Admission is free.

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