Pulling Strings in the Name of Her Art

“The guitar draws a lot of young people to concerts,” Sharon Isbin contends with conviction. “It’s the instrument that helped lead to the development of jazz, blues and country music. Everyone has grown up with it, in one way or another.”

She pauses a beat to set up her counterpoint. “The downside is that because it’s so well known as an accompanying instrument people don’t realize it can be a classical instrument as well. You’ll still find a few orchestras who’ve never had a guitarist and don’t want one because they still can’t take it seriously.”

As a proselytizer for the classical guitar, Isbin clearly still has work to do. But this week, her performance with Ani Kavafian and the L.A. Chamber Orchestra in Aaron Jay Kernis’ Double Concerto for Violin and Guitar has her walking among the converted. The chamber orchestra was part of the consortium, along with ensembles in St. Paul, Minn., and Aspen, Colo., that originally commissioned the piece for Isbin and violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.

Part of the guitar’s legitimacy problem lies in its limited repertory. While the piano and violin have centuries of music at their disposal, the first concerto for guitar, by Mario Castenuovo-Tedesco, dates only from 1939. Rodrigo’s famous “Concierto de Aranjuez” from 1940 has become the most performed concerto of the 20th century, but still, Isbin insists, “you can only hear Rodrigo so many times.” Hence the Kernis commission, the eighth concerto Isbin has helped coax from a list of composers including John Corigliano, Joan Tower, Lukas Foss and Tan Dun. Two more, by Christopher Rouse and William Bolcom, are due in the years 2000 and 2001, respectively.

Isbin’s concerto campaign began “very innocently” at age 17, she says, when she approached composer Ami Maayani after hearing his concerto for harp.

“His first answer was ‘No, I don’t know anything about the guitar,’ ” she recalls. “I played something for him later at a party and he finally said, ‘Yes, I think I can write something that will work.’ I learned two very valuable lessons from that: First, that ‘no’ means just try harder, and second, never be intimidated.”

Commissioning Cuban guitarist-composer Leo Brouwer was easy, and the same was true for Joseph Schwantner, whom Isbin only later discovered was a guitarist himself. There are advantages to knowing the instrument firsthand, she says, but still she declines to make general comparisons between guitarist and non-guitarist composers: “They’ve all approached the instrument from completely different perspectives.”

The most difficult composer to pin down, she says, was Corigliano. “He said, ‘A guitar concerto? Interesting idea. Call me in a year.’ And this went on for eight years,” Isbin says. On the advice of Corligliano’s publisher, she added a concept to her request: a theme of courtly love, with the guitarist strolling among the musicians. The composer was hooked.

“Wooing Corigliano has given me a little more insight into some of the key issues for composers who don’t know the instrument,” she says. “I’ve learned how to help them with the guitar and how it works, and to offer any changes that might help.”

Kernis, another non-guitarist, had at least written for the instrument before, including a solo suite and a work for guitar and string quartet for Bay Area solo guitarist David Tannenbaum. That did not, he insists, make the concerto any easier.

“Writing for the guitar is a brand-new experience every time I do it,” he says. “Most--maybe 90%--of the problem is how to shift chords with as much ease as possible. The crucial thing is to have an artist ready to work with you directly.”

Isbin was certainly prepared to do that. Meetings in person between guitarist and composer could last up to 12 hours. Phone calls were much shorter, primarily of the “this chord doesn’t work” variety, followed by Kernis’ faxed changes.

“Mostly it had to do with deletions,” he says. “I had too many chords with too many notes that required too many fingers that just weren’t there. I’ve learned that with the guitar, less is more.”

There was nothing minimal, however, about the required forces. With both an orchestra and a second solo instrument, the work needed an overall conception that would not only keep theguitar from being buried but would allow both soloists their own space.

“Aaron had a pretty good idea of how to pair the two instruments so that we’d always be heard,” says Isbin, who records the work this week for Argo with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and violinist Cho-Liang Lin. “There were times, though, that I have to use the pick [to get enough volume], because my nails were being torn to shreds.”

The word “if” surfaces frequently whenever Isbin describes her childhood. If she hadn’t discovered music at age 9, she would have become a scientist like her father. If her brother hadn’t pushed for guitar lessons, then backed out, she never would’ve taken the initiative herself. And if the Isbin family hadn’t been in Italy, with Sharon’s father on sabbatical from the University of Minnesota, her teacher might not have been a student of Andres Segovia.

“Ira wanted to play,” she remembers, “but what he had in mind was more Elvis Presley and the Beatles. But the thought that he would have to practice [classical music] an hour a day didn’t appeal to him.”

Isbin’s own frame of reference was more Joan Baez than Segovia, but right from her first guitar, custommade for her 9-year-old hands, Isbin found herself drawn to the classics. Further private studies back in Minnesota, and high profile classical competition victories as a teenager in Toronto and Munich in the mid-’70s, ignited her solo career. But in the end, she admits, it wasn’t so much the musical style that mattered as it was the limitless possibilities of the instrument, which she has made a point to follow as far as she can.

Take Bach. The composer’s lute suites have been a staple of guitar recitals since Segovia’s transcriptions in the 1940s. But in the late ‘70s, Isbin thought they cried out for a more historically faithful approach and turned to keyboardist and Bach scholar Rosalyn Tureck for help. Tureck agreed, and their collaboration resulted in a series of transcriptions later published by Schirmer and recorded for Virgin Classics.

Or take Brazilian music. Last month, Teldec released Isbin’s “Journey to the Amazon,” a recording of works for guitar and percussion with Brazilian composer and performer Thiago de Mello. It is only the most recent of her Latin excursions. Her duo-guitar work with Carlos Barbosa-Lima in the mid-’80s introduced her to the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, a tribute to whom Isbin participated in last month at Carnegie Hall.

Also in the mid-’80s, Isbin formed Guitarjam, a jazz fusion trio with guitarists Laurindo Almeida and Larry Coryell. Her work with Almeida, a bossa nova stylist, became her master class in Latin rhythms.

In 1988, Isbin borrowed the name Guitarjam for her critically acclaimed 5-part National Public Radio series, which traced the history of the instrument from English lute songs through Spanish repertory to contemporary American folk music. A year later, she was invited to create the guitar department at the Juilliard School.

Echos of Guitarjam the trio resurfaced in this year’s Guitar Summit, a 30-concert tour that Isbin completed last month with jazz great Herb Ellis, acoustic finger-style guitarist Michael Hedges and blues artist Rory Block. Rather than melding different genres as Guitarjam did, Guitar Summit kept each artist’s set separate, bringing them together only at the end.

“It was an opportunity to sample four different styles in one evening,” says Isbin, who took her set from her new Brazilian disc. “Each of us has a following, and this was a great way to get them all together.”

This freedom also finds its way into her classical work. Her commission from Lukas Foss specifically requested that he draw on the guitar’s folk, ballad and bluegrass heritage. Likewise, Kernis’s Double Concerto has its roots firmly planted in the vernacular.

“The work is a real jazz-inspired ensemble piece, with some tricky syncopations,” she says approvingly. “His music is passionate, and distinctly represents the culture in which he lives.”

Which, as Isbin herself might point out, is much like the guitar itself. SHARON ISBIN, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Dates: Friday, 8 p.m., Veterans Wadsworth Theater, VA Grounds, Brentwood; Saturday, 8 p.m., Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Prices: $12-$42. Phone: (213) 622-7001.