The Fiery Classicist

A student with long lank curls walked up the aisle of Crowder Hall at the University of Arizona and described to his girlfriend Japan’s Kazuhito Yamashita, who was playing here as part of a national tour that brings him to UCLA’s Royce Hall Friday.

“He burns !”

The reaction was typical of the buzz that met the first half of Yamashita’s classical guitar concert, in which he had played pieces by Fernando Sor, Johann Sebastian Bach and Benjamin Britten. They had seen a rapturous musician swoon over the guitar, his face occasionally buried in the crux of the neck and soundboard, rising off his stool as if the guitar were levitating.

Most guitarists sit with the neck at the 2 o’clock position and simply watch what they’re doing. Yamashita hangs on as though the currents of the music are taking him for a barely manageable ride through ecstasy, pain, troubled deliberation, and deliverance into the high sky of an unimaginable peace.

“He’s original, audacious. He always gets a response,” said Tom Patterson, who heads the university’s guitar department.

They hadn’t even heard what was to come, a complete, prodigious rendition of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony that took up the second half of the concert and left everyone shaking their heads. To haul the immense architectural edifice of an entire symphony with all its roots and rivulets out of that single soundhole--one isn’t supposed to do this sort of thing on the guitar.

That’s Yamashita. At 28, he has recorded 40 albums here and in Japan, including an “Italian Serenade” with flutist James Galway, an album called “Music of Spain” (he records in the United States on RCA Victor Red Seal), and a duo-guitar disc of works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy and Francaix with his younger sister, Naoko (he has also played in concert with jazz guitarist Larry Coryell).

But it was at the age of 19, in 1980, that he served notice with his individually arranged solo rendition of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” It was such a fiery and wholly unexpected tour de force that the guitar world greeted it much the same way Formula One circuit drivers peered at the first Ferrari tooling into their midst--with total astonishment.

This from a young man who took all of 20 minutes’ instruction from Andres Segovia, a few more hours with Narciso Ypes, Jose Thomas and Japanese instructor Kohjiro Kobune, and the rest from his father, a self-taught guitar instructor.

There is nothing about the offstage Yamashita to suggest the extravagance that comes out in his playing. He is trim, somewhat less than medium height with an inverted bowl of fine black hair, and graced with the politesse of someone who might be part of a diplomatic corps as well as a concert artist’s world; that is, he is delicate without seeming over-ethereal.

On the plane to Los Angeles he struggled through difficult English to explain that his father had been a shipyard engineer for Mitsubishi before he gave it up to found a guitar academy in Nagasaki, where Kazuhito was born, and it was for his father and friends that he first concertized.

Yamashita didn’t squawk when the stewardess made him put his classical Ramirez in the overhead bin, even though he had paid for an extra seat for his guitar. After the adjustment was made, he explained how he began entering Japanese competitions at the age of 10, and took first place in an all-Japan competition at 15.

1977 was his big year. He took first prize in Spain’s Ramirez competition in August, the Allessandro International Guitar Contest in Italy in September, and the Paris International Guitar Competition in October. He returned to Japan to find himself famous.

He spoke of musicians he admired. Julian Bream: “Very dreamy, very fantastical.” He asked questions. But soon the effort to converse in English tired him. He took out some sheet music and began transcribing Bach’s Sonata No. 6 for Unaccompanied Violin, which he will record later this year.

The next day in Los Angeles he had the aid of a translator, UCLA ethnomusicologist Yoshiko Okazaki, and in his hotel room he talked more of his life and music. “Two things brought me to the guitar,” he said. “From my first consciousness I heard guitar music at home with my father, Tohoru Yamashita, and his friends. To me, it wasn’t human not to play the guitar. Then, I heard ‘Romanza.’ It was so beautiful, I wanted to possess it by playing it.

“In high school I was only an average student. I used the homework time for practice--I didn’t believe in homework anyway. I could have chosen other occupations, but the guitar was always such a part of me. People’s expectations made me want to pursue and experience art. I never used any books on methodology. When I wanted to learn something I listened, and if I had trouble I asked my father. He’s not a good performer, but he’s a good teacher. Even now I’m learning from him.”

Yamashita is far from the only Japanese musician to take up a Western idiom (postwar Japan has had a keen thirst for jazz and pop as well as classical artists). Asked why this portion of the East so often looks West, he replied: “We are a very adaptable people. From olden times we brought in Chinese music. When we heard Western music, we adapted to that. We have sympathetic feelings for other cultures and like to reach out.”

He spoke of how he came by his extraordinary arrangement for “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which he created in almost total secrecy and only recorded after the urging of friends.

“I’ve always wanted to be able to play whatever came to my ear, whether it was classical music, or a TV or movie score. I never believed in the separation of music, saying, ‘This should be for the piano, or this for the orchestra.’ I always respond to melody, but with ‘Pictures’ I wanted to play the whole piece. The guitar has enormous possibilities for color and tone and symphonic expression. I also wanted to play a longer piece--to do one piece that lasted 40 minutes. That’s a challenge. When I’m playing I’m in another dimension, where I’m so attracted to a piece that it feels like traveling. At the end I feel I’ve arrived where I began.”

Yamashita has ambitions about his future that far transcend the normal hope of a concert artist. “Our scientific and economic development is such that I hope I can help through music to integrate spirituality into our way of life,” he said. “The faith of art and music is very important in this age and for the world.”

Where once it was simply the name of a place, the word Nagasaki is now a metaphor for one of the horrors of modern life. Has growing up there made him mindful of his home as a terminus of nuclear incineration, a symbol of militant contemporary paranoia?

“I don’t feel anything particularly about the past,” he replied. “But maybe, subconsciously, there might be something. The hope for peace in Nagasaki is very strong. It’s a beautiful city, more like a country place. I know that if I lived in Tokyo, I’d only see the separate sides of things. If I stay in the country, I can see the world move.”