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PressKaufam Concert Hall - concert preview December 2008
VERSATILE VIRTUOSO
Guitarist grooves to the music of Bach and Hendrix
By BRADLEY BAMBARGER
STAR-LEDGER STAFF
NEW YORK --
Many virtuosos become virtuosos because they hone their world down not only to their specific instrument but to their particular genre. Guitarist Benjamin Verdery is not that kind of virtuoso.
Verdery's musical horizon is wide. An hour-long conversation with him -- apropos of his recital Saturday at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y -- runs from J.S. Bach to Jimi Hendrix, from contemporary composers to Brooklyn indie-rock band the National. The 53-year-old credits early FM radio.
"The world is more compartmentalized now, but when I grew up in the '60s and early '70s, radio was color-blind, genre-blind," Verdery says. "You'd hear Bob Dylan after Aretha Franklin, the Beatles before James Brown. That shaped my ideal of listening even into my classical career."
Even Verdery's classical-guitar hero -- Julian Bream -- was famously keen on gypsy jazz and Indian classical, as well as enamored of Benjamin Britten alongside Bach. Bream "embraced music as a whole," he says, adding that the great Englishman also had an inspiring trait in common with another of Verdery's guitar heroes, Jimi Hendrix: "Bream was as much of a colorist on classical guitar as Hendrix was on electric."
On Saturday, Verdery will likely play one of his Hendrix arrangements as an encore (which he recorded on his excellent 2006 solo album, "Branches"). The main program will include two of Verdery's own compositions, plus Bach's majestic Chaconne and Verdery's version of Johann Strauss's waltz "On the Beautiful Blue Danube." The guitarist -- who is chair of Yale University's guitar department -- will also play a set of Schumann-esque miniatures by a Yale colleague, Martin Bresnick. And Bresnick features again with his arrangements of two pieces from Jan cek's lyrical solo piano collection "On an Overgrown Path," which Verdery describes as "special, real poems."
The recital's centerpiece will be the premiere of a Balinese-accented work by Ingram Marshall, "The Mentioning of Love," which will also feature Verdery's wife, Rie Schmidt, on alto flute. It's the fourth piece Marshall has written for Verdery and includes hints of the double concerto for classical and electric guitars the composer wrote for Verdery and Police man Andy Summers that the pair premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2004.
Verdery, who has collaborated on record with guitarists from classical (John Williams) to Celtic (Bill Coulter), recently released a duo album with Summers, "First You Build a Cloud." Summers is a longtime Verdery fan.
"Ben is a phenomenal player -- but he's also someone with highly original, off-the-wall ideas about music," Summers says. "He not only can do a fantastic arrangement of `The Blue Danube' for six-string guitar; he can also radically de-tune a twelve-string, play it with chopsticks and turn it into an orchestra from another planet."
Verdery, a Connecticut native, is a longtime resident of the Upper West Side, just across town from the 92nd Street Y, where he is curator of "The Art of the Guitar" series. Even with his starry collaborations, top-composer connections and Ivy League position, Verdery remains a genial, humble soul ("you can always be a better teacher," he muses at one point). But he is sure that his recitals aren't just for guitar geeks -- "I think any music lover new to classical guitar would be thrilled by the instrument's possibilities."
Verdery himself is endlessly enthused by different sounds, whether he comes upon them on a trip to Estonia or walking a Manhattan street. On the way home from the dentist just before this interview, he passed a busker playing the harp-like African kora -- "and, man, I'm totally into the kora."
PROGRAM:
VERDERY: Satyagraha
BACH: Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1004
MARSHALL: New Work for Flute & Guitar
[world premiere]
VERDERY: Tears for Peace
BRESNICK: Joaquin is Dreaming
[NY premiere written for Benjamin Verdery]
JANACEK: A Faded Leaf from
On an Overgrown Path (arr. Bresnick)
JANACEK: The Virgin Mary of Frydek from
On an Overgrown Path (arr. Bresnick)
STRAUSS: Blue Danube Waltz (arr. Verdery)
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|  | | | photo by Keith Klenowski |
Benjamin Verdery blew out all stops April 3 at the MusicNow Festival in Cincinnati. A unique and inspired festival, with the likes of Verdery, Bill Frisell, the Dirty Projectors, The National, Padma Newsome, Sufjan Stevens among others.
April 07, 2008
MusicNOW 2008 Night 2: An Evening of American Guitar
Day 2 of the MusicNOW festival at Memorial Hall was billed as "An Evening Of American Guitar." Avant Garde Jazz guitar legend Bill Frisell was the headliner, but Classical guitarist Ben Verdery stole the show with his opening set.
Choosing to begin his set with a three-song Jimi Hendrix medley arranged for solo acoustic guitar, Verdery immediately set the bar high as the moon. The fingers of both his hands gracefully leapt about the strings like cracked-out spiders as Verdery played "Ezy Rider," "Little Wing" and "Purple Haze" with effortless grace. He tossed in teases of a few other Jimi tunes in a blurry flurry of notes, harmonics, and rhythmic slaps on the body of the guitar. My jaw pretty much stayed on the ground for the duration of Verdery's set.
Performing primarily on the standard nylon-string acoustic guitar, Verdery also toyed around for a few minutes on a tiny Brazilian ukulele. Using an Ebow to coax ghostly howls from the diminutive instrument, he interspersed skronky chords full of open de-tuned strings in a hauntingly beautiful, quirky piece that was all too brief.
All around the hall I saw many of Wednesday's performers in attendance including The National's Dessner brothers and Aussie composer Padma Newsome cracking clever one-liners as he waited in line for one of the few, closet-sized restrooms. Up in the balcony, I noticed that Super-8 enthusiast Sufjan Stevens was not the only one filming Verdery's performance.
Verdery closed out his set proper with an amazing opus called "Be Kind All The Time," performed on what he called "treated guitar." "Treated" is, I believe, a musical term for an instrument that has been altered in some way. Like playing a trumpet with a wet sponge shoved down in the bell. Or dunking the end of a didgeridoo in a coffee pot full of water, for a different sound. (The sound of the latter can be heard on Frank Zappa's "Civilization Phaze III," by the way!).
For his closing number, Verdery employed the use of a digital delay pedal, capturing certain passages that would repeat so he could accompany himself. In the middle of the song he looped a hypnotic passage then laid the guitar flat in his lap. Then he grabbed a chopstick from his music stand and jammed it up under the guitar strings, creating a makeshift bridge about halfway up the guitar's neck. The stabbing, scratchy sound this made joined the trance-inducing loop, as did the sound that was generated when Verdery stuck a handful of paperclips on the strings around the area of the guitar's sound hole. (Follow me so far?) Then he grabbed another chopstick and began to lightly tap on the guitar's strings creating a bell-like sound that reminded me of Buddhist chanting. The bells echoed for a few moments until Verdery skillfully removed the chopsticks and paper clips, then returned the guitar to its original upright position in his lap to close out the piece. This was one of the most insanely original guitar performances I have ever witnessed.
It made me realize that even the most educated Rock Guitar Connoisseurs among us are just Scholars Of The Great Hackfest. In just 5 minutes, Verdery creates more mind-numbingly original excitement and virtuosic fire than Jimmy Page has since 1969. Or anyone else for that matter. Tonight I watched Verdery expand the vocabulary of guitar playing right before my very eyes. Literally unbelievable.
That being my personal take on Verdery's set, even an established giant like Bill Frisell didn't hold much hope of blowing me away. Granted, his performance with The 858 Quartet - Frisell's guitar augmented by a three-piece string section - was unique and impressive. Their first tune went on too long frankly, but was saved by a flawlessly smooth segue into an upbeat carnival Blues that elicited a goofy boyish grin from the grey-haired and bespectacled Frisell.
A Mad Scientist of Jazz guitar, Frisell too has taken the guitar into previously uncharted territory repeatedly and consistently throughout his long and illustrious career. It was a rare treat to see a musician of his caliber in The Queen City.
But this night belonged to Ben Verdery.
- Ric Hickey
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Concluding his first season March 1 as Artistic Director for Art of the Guitar at the 92nd St Y in New York City, Benjamin Verdery along with Frederic Hand, William Kanengiser, David Leisner, David Tannenbaum and Scott Tenant celebrated the life and legacy of Julian Bream to a SRO crowd.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Music Review | 75th Birthday Tribute to Julian Bream
Expansionist in the Realm of the Guitar
Celebrations of composers' birthdays are easily done: if you've played their music, you've paid tribute to them in the best possible way. Celebrating a performer is harder. The things that make a performer special - a particular approach to sound, an identifiable way of turning a phrase or a special measure of eloquence in a certain repertory - are by definition nontransferable. And performances based on another performer's style are never very satisfying.
The 75th-birthday tribute to the great English guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday evening avoided those pitfalls, partly because the six musicians made no effort to parrot Mr. Bream's style. But mainly this tribute worked because Mr. Bream's contributions went beyond performance. He expanded the guitar and lute repertories by commissioning works from renowned composers, making transcriptions and reviving pieces that had been forgotten for centuries. (Mr. Bream, who lives in Dorset, England, and stopped touring in 2002, did not attend.)
The program began with a lute set. Frederic Hand did the honors, opening with a brisk, clean-lined account of two selections from Tielman Susato's "Danseyre," and including a beautifully phrased, introspective reading of Dowland's "Melancholy Galliard" and a zesty performance of an anonymous favorite, "Kemp's Jig." Mr. Hand, who studied with Mr. Bream, ended his set with the premiere of "For Julian," a lute work he composed for the occasion built of themes in an Elizabethan style, with contemporary harmonic and rhythmic touches.
David Tanenbaum and Benjamin Verdery devoted their sections of the program to works Mr. Bream commissioned. Mr. Tanenbaum's fluent, warm-toned performance of Takemitsu's "All in Twilight" (1987) brought out the gentle dissonances and carefully etched themes that make this composer's atmospheric late works so appealing.
Still, Mr. Verdery had more to work with: Britten's "Nocturnal" (1963), the greatest of Mr. Bream's acquisitions, is a set of variations on Dowland's "Come, Heavy Sleep," with the theme heard unadorned only at the end. Mr. Bream's performances of the work were virtuosic but ruminative. Mr. Verdery was more assertive, but his crisp, sharply defined textures and slightly impetuous phrasing suited the restless quality of Britten's elaboration on Dowland's dark theme.
Mr. Bream commissioned enough first-rate works that the program could have been devoted exclusively to them. But the players wanted to offer standard repertory works to which Mr. Bream was partial as well. David Leisner contributed a poetic traversal of the five Villa-Lobos Preludes. William Kanengiser played works by Falla, and Scott Tennant gave a soulful, gracefully articulated performance of Rodrigo's "En los Trigales."
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Adelaide International Guitar Festival, December, 2007December, 2007 marked the first Adelaide International Guitar Festival. The closing concert, Kiss The Sky: A Tribute To The Music Of Jimi Hendrix, was hosted by WYNC's John Schaeffer, and featured, among others, Vernon Reid, Jeff Lang, Benjamin Verdery, Diesel, Jorma Kaukonen, John Hammond and Jim Moginie....
..Classical maestro Benjamin Verdery of Yale University opened the show, which is fair given he was a Hendrix-obsessed 16-year-old before starting his classical career. His solo re-workings of "Easy Ryder", "Little Wing" and "Purple Haze", with a snippet of "Wind Cries Mary", were tantalizing.
Australian Guitar Magazine.
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in recital
...inventive...an iconoclastic player...achingly beautiful introduction (Hendrix).
NEW YORK TIMES
Here is a musician who knows what he wants and where he wants to go, and has the fiery technique to get him there. This kind of music making is exhilarating.
ST LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Verdery belongs to a group of younger American guitarists who do not see such a clear division between popular music and classical music, and who have achieved a high technical standard in order to further develop the original American music tradition. Appropriately his program looked like this: Prince and Jimi Hendrix - next to Bach and Janacek, next to his own compositions.
VON JURGEN BIELER, BONNER RUNDFSCHAU, BONN GERMANY
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Mr. Prey and Mr. Verdery brought an affecting sweetness and intimacy to this greatly lyrical music.
(Schubert's Frühlingsglaube) NEW YORK TIMES
Verdery's hands move with a fluid ease that is beautiful to see and even more beautiful to hear.
THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL
Verdery was then joined by John Williams for three duets. Their perfect rapport made splendidly evident from the start in the Williams arrangement of the theme and variations from `Brahms First String Sextet', which they played as with a single mind.
THE GUARDIAN (London)
Benjamin Verdery is without a doubt a great guitarist possessing an astonishing technique.
CORDOBA TIMES (Spain) |
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on disc...
The phrasing and exceptional breathing of Mozart's Adagio inspires one to the point of wanting to go play the original on the piano. Listen in excess, self-indulge in this recording.
GUITARE CLASSIQUE (Branches)
Choosing a high point from a programme list where nothing is below 'superb' is nigh-on impossible, but if pushed my preference would have to be the exquisitely-composed Eleven Etudes.
CLASSICAL GUITAR (Start Now)
Throughout, their interplay is perfectly in sync. The way they hold back some phrases and push others forward, their matching articulations, and their selections of instrumental colors show just how well the two work together.
ACOUSTIC GUITAR (Enchanted Dawn, Schmidt/Verdery flute & guitar Duo)
with orchestra...
Cascades of guitar notes rippled with unbelievable clarity in the fire and fleetness of Rodrigo's two outer movements. Verdery is safe at any speed. The soloist even met the challenges in the famed `Adagio'.
PACIFIC MAGAZINE (CA) (with the Santa Cruz Symphony, JoAnn Falletta, cond.)
The second half of the concert was a sheer joy. Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Guitar Concerto in D, Op. 99, was beautifully performed by Verdery, who captured all its fire and lyricism.
THE WASHINGTON POST (with The Handel Festival Orchestra) |
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