Was it your idea to record three great guitar concerti from the 20th Century?

It was actually the people at my label, Warner Bros, who wanted this recording of the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez. Together, we decided to also include the Villa Lobos and Ponce. It is all Latin-based music and the pieces represent the guitar in the traditional 20th Century concerto repertoire.

You have played the Rodrigo concerto extensively and recorded it twice before. Had you played Ponce and Villa Lobos much before these sessions?

I have played both before with Jose Serebrier who was the conductor for this project. I had just performed the Ponce in Nashville a month before the recording sessions. I’ve played the Villa Lobos and Ponce enough times over the past 20 years to know what the challenges are and to work out good fingerings. About 15 years ago, I went over the Villa Lobos with Carlos Barbosa Lima who, as a Brazilian, has unusual insight into this music. He had great ideas for bringing out some rhythmic ideas and showed me fingerings that would compliment them. Villa Lobos was using dance forms like the modinha and the Brazilian waltz in the various movements. It was nice to have had all of this music percolating in my mind over the past 20 years before committing it to a recording.

On the CD, the ensemble passages that the guitar plays with the orchestra are very tight. Did it take a lot of rehearsal for both you and the orchestra to feel the phrases the same way?

That was a challenge on this recording. We only had three sessions, each consisting of two hours of playing time on three consecutive days. I had played the Rodrigo with the New York Philharmonic and a different conductor four days before the recording, and that’s what made this project feasible. Having had the time to work with the orchestra on one of the more difficult pieces beforehand helped immensely. Otherwise, I would have had to say no to the idea of recording this project with so little time. We recorded the Rodrigo the first day and on day two, the orchestra was seeing the Ponce for the first time. On day three they read the Villa Lobos for the first time. The great thing was that the musicians were very enthusiastic about this recording. This is an orchestra that has a reputation for being really hardnosed, but they couldn’t have been more willing to give 100 percent. They loved this music. We had the regular principal players of the orchestra and they were so eager to ask questions and really be a part of this project in the best way they could.

Jose, the conductor, spent hours marking the scores and going over the parts. There were many things to correct in the Ponce and Villa Lobos because they are rarely played. We had no time at the sessions to decide questions about notes, bowings for the string players, and how to phrase. Jose worked out all of that beforehand. One of the reasons I chose to work with him was because he understands the guitar and its balance issues better than many conductors do. As well, he is from Uruguay and understands the rhythms of South American music. I like to take time and stretch certain phrases, and Jose was willing to spend the time with me before the recording going over passages to make sure we were on the same wavelength. You couldn’t just come in cold and do this. There was no opportunity to go overtime with the orchestral sessions. Because the orchestra had other rehearsals to go to.

Your performance of the Rodrigo concerto with this orchestra last June was the first time in 26 years that they had played with a guitarist and the recording is the first they’ve ever made with guitar.

That’s right, so this is somewhat historical. As I mentioned, the concert in June made this recording possible. The recording wasn’t planned long in advance and was only confirmed about six months before when the orchestra unexpectedly had the three days open up after a tour was cancelled. Originally Warners had planned to use a Spanish orchestra for the recording. When we heard that the New York Philharmonic might be available, we took a chance and cancelled the other orchestra before the dates were even confirmed.

I really wanted the best orchestra possible so this would be done right. We recorded in 22 tracks in order to have mix capability later. These pieces have so many levels and layers of lines going on and I wanted to get both the orchestra and the guitar at the correct volume. We got a really beautiful guitar sound that I think may set a new industry standard for guitar concerti.

This was my seventh recording with orchestra and may be my last. I’ve done everything I want to do with orchestra. I really wanted to have this album be a legacy I could leave behind that puts the guitar in the spotlight it deserves to be in.

The first performing edition of the Concierto de Aranjuez had a bunch of things that needed to be changed to make the guitar part more playable. Many guitarists have published their editions of the guitar part. Do you use a particular edition of the piece?

When you look at the Tarrego, which was the first published edition, the corrections are minimal. I had studied this concerto with Oscar Gighlia when I was 15 and got his fingerings then. I continue to use some of them, but I’ve changed some things over the years. I find it important to use rest stroke for the sixteenth-note runs to project over the orchestra. I still use the rasgueado strumming patterns Gighlia gave me for the opening chords of the piece. They work beautifully and give the intro a spark.

In your recent performance of the Rodrigo with the Boston Classical Orchestra, I noticed that you used a pick for some of the fast strumming passages in the second movement.

I don’t know of anyone else who does that. The reason I do is because about 20 years ago when I was playing the piece, I was doing those strummed passages as rasgueados and the nail on my ring finger broke off. I had to play the whole last movement without it and it sounded awful. I didn’t want to go through that again. Now I keep a pick balanced on my knee and pick it up at a spot right before I need it. The pick gives a fiery intensity and there is no risk of breaking a nail.

You have been playing a suite of Joan Baez songs in your solo concerts. What can you tell me about this new solo piece?

I loved what John Duarte did with the American folk tunes he arranged for Appalachian Dreams that I recorded on my Dreams of a World CD. So I asked him to make a new solo piece drawing on songs that Joan Baez made famous. I got in touch with Joan to see if she would be okay with this idea and she was thrilled. Joan was on tour on the east coast when I gave the premiere of the work in San Francisco. She sent a beautiful bouquet of flowers to the concert—along with her 90-year-old mother. We had a delightful chat afterward.

Duarte has had a very rough year battling cancer and I didn’t know if I’d be able to play the suite for him. I sent him a live recording of it before he went into the hospital but he was in no condition to evaluate it for four months. I was relieved to see him doing well last summer and got to work over the piece with him. I hope to record it—perhaps in the next year. It will be like a sequel to the concept of my Dreams of a World CD, which was based on folk-inspired music from around the world.

You’ve premiered a lot of new pieces in your career. What new works will you be playing in the near future?

The next premiere is a duet composed by Steve Vai that we will play together February 5 in Paris. I’ve gotten to know Steve and we’ve become friends. We played as a duo in New York at the Bottom Line and in Atlanta. I generally play some Latin pieces and he improvises over them. His new piece will be a 14-minute suite that will feature him on electric guitar and me on classical guitar.

This is an unusual setting for you and Vai’s following is very different from yours.

True. I went to see him play on the G3 tour. It was like being in an alternate universe. I don’t think there were more than five women among the audience of 2,000. Steve was playing along with Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani and it was a really high-energy evening. What we will do will not be that kind of a shootout. The new piece will exploit the lyricism of Steve’s writing and my playing and will fuse our styles.

Years ago you studied with some great guitarists as well as with keyboardist and Baroque scholar Rosalyn Tureck. How did a non-guitarist help your playing?

I spent 10 years from the late 1970s to the 1980s working with her on the Bach Lute Suites to get a better understanding of Baroque performance practices that hadn’t been explored by guitarists. Back then she was at the vanguard of those exploring performance practices for Bach’s keyboard music. Since the lute suites come from a keyboard tradition, there was no one better to turn to. Because she was not a guitarist she had no preconceptions about what was possible and what wasn’t. I had to find a way to finger and play whatever musical effects she wanted.

Fingerings that would bring out the contrapuntal voices on the guitar hadn’t really been explored much at that point. As well, a piece such as the Prelude from the Prelude Fugue and Allegro has no ornaments or embellishments written in the score. When you add those and acknowledge that there are four voices instead of two in the first measures of the piece, it brings out the structure and the music sounds richer. Baroque musicians in Bach’s time always added embellishments and ornamentation to repeated sections for variety and to bring out the structure of a piece. As 21st Century musicians, we have to understand these things if we are going to play Baroque music well.

Are there significant things that shaped your playing that you picked up from studying with Oscar Gighlia, Segovia, and other guitarists?

I started playing guitar at nine and I studied Aldo Minella in Italy during the time that my father, a college professor, was taking a sabbatical year in Italy. Aldo is a very elegant musician who had studied with Segovia and came from that tradition. When I returned to Minneapolis at 10, I took lessons with Jeff Van and worked with him steadily until I was 16. I had played for Segovia at 14 and took about five lessons with him. I studied with Oscar Gighlia at the Aspen Festival when I was 15 and continued for five summers. He was a major influence on me. Phil Defremery was his assistant and was very helpful at articulating the specific process for using the right hand to produce different kinds of sounds. I also studied with Alrio Diaz at the Banff Summer Music Festival in Canada. He opened up the world of South American music to me—a direction that continues in my life. I also had a handful of lessons with Julian Bream. I am very grateful that these people spent time with me. I try to do the same for my students. You can’t do this alone.

You have learned how to eliminate almost all of the string noise in your playing. How do you advise students wanting to clean up their sound?

Well, for the right hand, players should take care to not strike the nail against the wrappings of the bass strings. You have to follow the direction of the coil and avoid striking at an angle. The left hand is where most of the noise comes from. There are a few ways I teach for avoiding the noise. You lift the fingers vertically up off the string. Think of a helicopter taking off, not an airplane. If you want to play a portamento so that the notes are connected, there are three ways to minimize noise. You can place your finger on the flat part of the pad behind the callus on the fingertip or to the left or right of the callus. The secret is that you have stay off the callus.

When you warm up, do you play etudes or excerpts from your repertoire that will work scales or arpeggios?

It depends on whether it is the day of a concert. I always play scales in a three-part regimen with a metronome. Segovia’s major and minor scale fingerings are fine for that. I choose about four or five fingerings and play them with rest stroke and free stroke and with different right-hand fingerings; im, ia, and ami. I also do Segovia’s slur studies. I will play the Villa Lobos Etude 1 with different right-hand combinations. I will do it as written, then without the thumb using i and m, then i and a, then and m and a. This is a very good workout. My warm-ups might take 45 minutes to an hour. After that, I will play pieces.

How much time do you spend practicing on an average day?

I wish there was such a thing as an average day! On a travel day, I might not get any practice time at all with the instrument, so I do mental work. Even if I am sitting on a plane all day, I will go through my whole program in my mind. II think of the music and all of the fingerings for both hands. It’s a visualization technique that secures the memory in such a way that it frees you to enjoy your performance more because you have complete confidence that your memory is solid. This has worked with my students who feel they have memory problems. Like practicing on the instrument, it’s not something you do once, you have to do it over and over again.

Are there any points that you wish all students had knowledge of before they come to you?

When I audition students who are planning to study with me later, I tell them about how they use the body to hold the guitar to eliminate tension. A lot of people have a habit of lifting up their foot while they play. This creates enormous tension that travels up through the leg, back, shoulder, neck, face, arms, and hands. You want to get rid of that and play in the most relaxed manner possible.

Another area is rhythm. I find that a lot of guitarists who don’t have orchestral or chamber music experience don’t know how to count. They need to learn the importance of rhythm and that having a strong sense of rhythm is key to making good music. Once you understand the pulse, you can be flexible in an intelligent way. If there is rhythmic anarchy, everything sounds confused.

Shaping phrases and being lyrical are other things. Unlike the violinist who can get sustain with the bow, we pluck the strings. So there is often a lack of awareness of what it means to play legato. You get this punch, punch pick, pick quality as opposed to a real seamless connection that other instruments or singers get. That often gives a one dimensional quality to the musical lines. Listening to great singers, wind, or stringed instrument players can be extremely helpful for learning about the contour of a line.

As well, students have to understand the different voices in a polyphonic piece in order to bring them all out. Producing a good tone is another important subject. I give my students ideas to help those with a tinny sound produce a rounded and elegant tone with the versatility to produce ponticello or sul tasto effects.

Travel is a big part of a concert artist’s life. Have you gotten comfortable living out of a suitcase?

When I go away these days, it is not for extended periods of time. I’ve found a balance where I can go out for three weeks or less and then I come back home. As long as I can touch bases with home, the rest doesn’t seem like an imposition. The annoying things are waiting in lines at the airport, the inconsistencies of weather and the airlines, and getting my instrument on to a flight. I never check my guitar as baggage. I research the aircraft to make sure the overhead bin will accommodate my instrument. I have a very small case that will almost always fit. When it doesn’t, I have to buy another seat for it. I travel with minimal stuff.

Does having Grammy-winning CDs mean that you have to include some of your most popular pieces in every program?

No. The only mandate I get is to not play the same program again if I am returning to a city that I played only a year ort two earlier. I love playing a solo version from the Tan Dun-Seven Desires for Guitar. It is an 11-minute version of the 30-minute concerto. It captures the exoticism from the Chinese folk-themes. I also play the two Duarte pieces: Appalachian Dreams and the Joan Baez Suite. They have become staples of my repertoire.

Have you ever encountered unusual difficulties in getting to your concerts?

In my career, I’ve only missed one concert when a blizzard shut down the airport in Minneapolis and I couldn’t get out to Souix Falls. A volcano erupted in Sicily when I was to go there, and a bomb was found in Ancona Airport once I had to deal with extra security. I’ve played with a temperature of 103, but that doesn’t happen very often because I am careful about my health. Once, my hand got slammed in a door before a concert. Thie fingers didn’t swell, so I was able to play. Somehow it always works out. When you come out on stage, you have to make it look like everything has been perfect. The audience will have no sympathy for what you have gone through. They want to hear what they came to hear.