A pioneer in classical guitar, Isbin continues to break ground
"I didn't set out to conquer the world," says guitarist Sharon Isbin, who did just that. "I just wanted to become the best player I could be, myself, and a lot of things happened that I could never have predicted."
The honor roll of the 47-year-old guitarist's accomplishments is long. She has commissioned and premiered major new works for her instrument; she has recorded more than 20 albums; she created the first guitar department at the Juilliard School of Music; she collaborated with the great Bach specialist Rosalyn Tureck in creating new editions of Bach for guitar; in 2001 she took home the first Grammy a classical guitarist had won in 30 years, and in 2002 she won another.
Isbin has been on the cover of 31 magazines, and you can look at the glamorous images on her website, www.sharonisbin.com. Her next recording, of Joaquin Rodrigo's perpetually popular Concierto de Aranjuez, along with concertos of Villa-Lobos and Ponce, with the New York Philharmonic, was made after the first concerts by a guitarist with the orchestra in 26 years and is its first-ever recording with a guitarist. On an advance copy she sounds glorious, playing with strong-backed rhythm and an astonishing spectrum of subtly shaded colors and dynamics.
Isbin has a soft spot for Boston, and she has been coming here to play for most of her career -- a cousin is the talk-show host and film critic David Brudnoy. She returns next week to play a concerto by Vivaldi, adapted from a lute piece, and the Rodrigo Concierto with Steven Lipsitt and the Boston Classical Orchestra in Faneuil Hall.
Lipsitt met Isbin when they were students at Yale. "She reminds me of Yo-Yo Ma in this way -- she could easily rest on her laurels and keep going around doing the same things over and over again. Instead she is constantly asking herself questions like `Why am I a musician?' and `What else can I do?' She has this voracious musical curiosity that feeds her imagination, and she is charismatic in all the best ways -- she is really dedicated to establishing a connection to the audience. I love her playing because it is so elastic, so singing, so sensuous, so evocative, yet she can lock into a groove the way the great nonclassical guitarists do."
Isbin has played the Rodrigo Concierto "hundreds of times" since her first performance more than 30 years ago; she has recorded it three times.
"I don't remember the very first time I played it," she says, "but one of the earliest ones was on a broadcast of a competition in Spain in 1979, and that led to my friendship with the composer, Joaquin Rodrigo, who had heard me on the radio and got in touch with me."
Isbin says the famous slow movement was written when Rodrigo's wife had a miscarriage in 1939. "He couldn't sleep at night after visiting her in the hospital; he sat at the piano and developed this beautiful theme full of of nostalgia, pain, and sadness. Even if you don't know the story behind it, somehow you can hear that."
The piece has become one of the most performed, and recorded, concertos written in the 20th century, and it has traveled far beyond the guitar world. Miles Davis made a famous version of the slow movement, which Rodrigo later turned into a song with lyrics by his wife. Isbin performs the song on an album with mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer.
Although the guitar is a quiet instrument, meant to be heard on a domestic scale and not built to project into a large, modern concert hall, audiences don't have any trouble hearing Isbin. In recent years she has worked with a specially designed wireless sound-enhancement system, developed in large part by Roger Cane of Cane Audio Systems, that she sends ahead to each of her engagements. "I want the guitar to sound as if it were being played in someone's living room," she says.
Isbin's achievements loom even larger because she is the first woman to reach the top level of the solo classical guitar world. "The heritage of the instrument is in the folk world, and it has been popular in pop, bluegrass, and jazz," she says. "From the '60s on, teenage boys who played rock guitar shifted gears when they heard the classical guitar and liked it. Just how many young girls were playing rock guitar? Just how many are doing it now? I don't think the ratio of male to female guitar students is going to change very fast -- the vast majority of my students have been men, and with the exception of one student this year, none of the women has been American."
Always looking for new projects, for the last season Isbin has been playing a suite of folk tunes associated with Joan Baez, arranged for her by composer John Duarte. Early next year, at the Châtelet in Paris, she will play a new work that heavy-metal guitarist Steve Vai, a fan, has written to play with her.
And she is excited to be making her debut in a television drama series -- on an episode of Showtime's "The L Word," scheduled to air in March.
"I play myself," she says. "I play the guitar in a scene in the nightclub on the show called The Planet, but I also have some lines. There are only four of them -- but they are good ones."
