On Thursday, April 7th, I joined some of our fellow composition students in attending a Junior Recital at Cal State San Bernardino just up the road a bit. The student was a guitarist named Mario Verlangieri. All in all, Mario performed seven pieces for classical guitar. While there were some good moments in each of the pieces individually, as a whole, there was not a lot of variety during the recital. Many of the pieces seem to bleed into the next and after a short time, I'd completely lost track of what piece we were currently hearing performed. What I enjoyed most was a section of one of the middle pieces that used a lot of harmonics on the guitar. It was a nice change for a while. I think the harmonics of the guitar are too often neglected as most pieces for the classical guitar don't do much to try to stray from it's usual style and sound. I left this performance with a new appreciation and understanding for how useful and exciting it can be to challenge performers to try new things that are not typical of their instrument's usual roll. The classical guitar needs more variety, even if only to keep the audience from getting a bit sleepy during junior recitals.
-Bryce Doubravsky
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