Isbin Harmonizes With a Higher Vision

Anyone who’s heard Sharon Isbin play classical guitar cannot help but note the water-smooth clarity and penetrating intelligence she brings to her music.

Isbin, who plays tonight at Occidental College, is never dry in the name of rectitude, never coasts through one part of a piece in order to speed on to a brilliant highlight. Which isn’t to say that she doesn’t have fun up there. In fact, the past couple of appearances she’s made in Southern California have been with Laurindo Almeida and Larry Coryell. That isn’t the company kept by anyone who enshrines the classical guitar as an icon of votive authority.

“I put on a Carnegie Hall festival in 1985 called ‘Guitarstream,’ which involved all different forms of music from classical to jazz, folk, Middle Eastern and flamenco,” Isbin said on the telephone from New York.

“It was extraordinary to see how the guitar has figured in so many cultures and in so many periods . . . It’s amazing how many ways the guitar has been meaningful to people.”

This combination of openness and discipline has drawn a variety of musicians to her side. One of the few female guitarists on the concert tour, she’s worked with Antonio Carlos Jobim. The exacting Leo Brouwer sent her, unsolicited, the Ballades for tonight’s program. Joseph Schwantner wrote his “fantasy for guitar,” “From Afar . . .,” which she premiered with the St. Louis Symphony. Lukas Foss is writing a concerto which she will introduce at Avery Fisher Hall in New York.

Still, classical performance has been Isbin’s distinction since she won the Toronto International Festival in 1975, and it’s in the classical mode that she will play here, in works by Bach, Brouwer, the Brazilian Isais Savio, Rodrigo, Britten and Augustin Barrios.

One member of the local guitar cognoscenti, James Smith, director of the classical guitar program at USC, remembers Isbin from Toronto: “She beat out an impressive roster of players who have gone on to important careers, such as Eliot Fisk, Manuel Barrueco and David Leisner,” he said.

“I remember her playing as elegant, polished, poised and refined. I don’t know what happened to her after that. For a while you didn’t hear about her. But I think her association with the harpsichordist Rosalyn Tureck helped her a great deal.”

Isbin wasn’t a natural. “I was very directed as a child,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for music, I’m sure I’d be a brain surgeon or a research scientist today. I was a serious kid. Music loosened me up.”

Isbin’s father was a Minneapolis chemical engineering professor who was hired for consulting work in Italy, and took his family in tow.

She started on guitar as a 9-year-old. Five years later, back in Minnesota, she was dutiful but unconvinced. After all, what were bar and arpeggio exercises compared to “launching rockets 300 miles an hour behind the school yard? We sent up a lot of grasshoppers and worms in nose cones. My father was my greatest problem when he’d say, ‘You can’t launch your rockets until you practice an hour.’ ”

An appearance with the Minnesota Orchestra at 14 changed that: She began to discover the seriousness and importance of the guitar. She spent summers studying with Oscar Ghiglia in Aspen. At 18, she won Toronto. At 19, she won the Munich competition and began the career that took her through Europe, the Middle East, Japan and Latin America.

What happened in the meantime is that she went to Yale to complete her studies in music and languages--she stayed long enough to get her master’s degree--and joined the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music. But she also hit a snag.

Isbin had done well in the austere environment of competitions and was making her way as a musician.

But an old familiar, Bach--who seems so accessible to the ordinary listener--wasn’t yielding the sweets of revelation that keep a composition alive.

“I was frustrated by what I’d heard of Bach on guitar,” Isbin said. “The whole issue of Baroque embellishment and trills, the true technique, eluded and frustrated me. The original concept of the music was unclear to me.”

Then Isbin met and began working with Tureck, “one of Bach’s greatest exponents, who has an extraordinary knowledge. . . .”

All that may seem esoteric in the overall scheme of things, but it was a key toward opening up Isbin’s expansive musical personality.

She has been given an unprecedented teaching post--head of the first guitar program at Juilliard. When she’s away from music, she likes to ride horseback, hike, or ski, anything to remind herself “there’s another world out there,” she said.

“TV and movies are replete with the grim reality of our culture. They offer so little hope, or the possibility for transcendence. I believe there is such a thing as artistic responsibility. I want to achieve as much depth as possible, to communicate as much as possible.”