Posts Tagged ‘bach’
Video – Olivia Chiang at GSI
Olivia Chiang stopped by the showroom last week with her father James, who is also her teacher. Olivia is just 12 years old, but you’d never know that from listening to her play. Olivia started playing the piano at the age of five and switched to guitar by the time she was seven (and I ‘d say the switch seems justified). Here she is playing Bach’s Prelude and Allegro from BWV998 on a 1995 Edmund Blochinger and Tarrega’s Capricho Arabe on a 2011 Tobias Berg. I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from Olivia in the future.
We have some more videos of young Australian virtuoso Alberta Khoury. You’ll remember that she was in town for the Parkening International Guitar Competition, and even though she was only 16 at the time she competed in the adult division and was a semi-finalist. Here she is playing the Prelude to Bach’s lute suite, BWV 1006, on a Ramirez Elite, and Dowland’s Fantasia #7 on a 2008 Paco Santiago Marin ’30th Anniversary’.
Mak Grgic is currently studying for his master’s degree at USC, but he’s already played to audiences all over the world and won a few competitions. He stopped by the shop last week and recorded Bach’s Chaconne on a beautiful 1950 Ignacio Fleta (these are pretty rare – Fleta’s guitar output was very low until 1955, as he was mostly making other stringed instruments before that).
Here’s guitarist Eva Beneke in her new video playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 6, Prelude, in and around L.A. She’s playing her Kenny Hill ‘Signature’ model guitar, and we just got a very similar one in this week.
Our good friend Yury Nugmanov was here all week shooting a documentary about the guitar for Russian TV. The two main things they had to shoot for the film were his visit with Pepe Romero down in San Diego, and his visit to GSI, where he got his beloved Miguel Rodriguez a few years back.
Probably the reason Yury is so good is that he literally can’t put down the guitar. More than pretty much any guitarist I know, he just never stops playing, so we knew he’d be good for some videos as he played a bunch of our guitars. There are more to come, but here are the first three:
A dancer I used to work with a lot used to say that if you want to do three turns on stage, you’d better be able to do five in the studio. By extension, you could argue that to perform a fast piece you might want to practice it at an even faster tempo to make sure you can control it. These videos take that idea perhaps a step too far, performing the pieces much faster than most of us might consider necessary, and the guys at GSI have been kicking these videos back forth, so here are a few of them:
Dave Tate turned me on to this and I’m guessing you’ll either love it or hate it. It’s jazz guitarist Pete Downes’ take on Bach’s Partita 3, and then for reference here’s John Williams playing it the way we’re used to hearing it, which is of course new compared to what Bach would have heard, so….
So yesterday I posted Juanjo Dominguez playing a 7-string guitar, then today I saw we had an 8-string in (1993 Peter Barton spruce-top), so I went on YouTube to hear some 8-string and found this guy playing it with his chin. And I’m not kidding about the chin. Am I the only one who didn’t know about this?
I had a recording of this when I was a kid and it’s still one of my favorite arrangements of anything for guitar quartet. .
Truth is, of course, that YouTube is unkind to the Maestro for obvious reasons. His fault, really, for being born before camera phones. Here’s a slightly more elegant performance, though to hear him in his prime you have to go to his recordings. Turns out there are still some things in life you can’t experience on YouTube. That thought makes me happy.
