The combination of a lot of hard work and some fortunate coincidences have contributed to making the Julian Gray and Ronald Pearl guitar duo one of the best sounding classical duos playing today.

Happy coincidences include Pearl's studies with Aaron Shearer and Gray's studies with Shearer protegé Ray Chester in the years before they met at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory. This provided a similar approach to guitar technique. More coincidence than calculation, they bought guitars from the same maker (Richard Bruné), and discovered years later that the instruments were made from the same tree. [See "Gearbox" for more information.]

Their three Dorian CDs reveal much attributable to hard work rather than serendipity. Insightful, creative interpretations are the hallmark of their work. While many guitarists play Scarlatti sonatas, none have exposed their latent flamenco shadings as Gray and Pearl have. The depth and passion in their performance of Pearl's transcription of Brahm's opus 118 Intermezzo number 2, rivals that in versions by celebrated pianists.

Details like changes in dynamics, timbre, crescendos, rubato or accelerando are flawlessly choreographed. "It takes a lot of effort to get the music to this point," states Pearl. "One reason we work so hard on things like slurring, articulations, and matching tone colors is that we don't see them as details, to us they are essentials."

In the course of their years together, Gray and Pearl have explored classical music's major style periods. The Magic Circle, their 1993 debut, showcases works from Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th century periods. Baroque Inventions, from1995, focuses only on their transcriptions of works by Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti. Homages and Evocations (1996) probes works by contemporary contemporary specifically composed for two guitars.

The pair began playing together after meeting at Peabody Conservatory in 1982. "Ron was just finishing his master's program, I had already graduated," says Gray. "We got together to read through some music, initially, just for a few local concerts." They found they had much in common esthetically, and began learning music and transcribing works to perform.

A shared ideal of perfecting each piece before presenting it publically is one reason their performances are of such high quality. "We nail down exactly what we want to do with virtually every note so that we are making unified gestures," says Gray. "By really coordinating with each other, we can be freer and more responsive in concert."

"We never say that a part is just good enough," says Pearl, "we have to get it right. The people I like to listen to get way beneath the skin of a piece. Pablo Casals worked on the Bach Cello Suites for something like10 years before he would play them in public." Similarly, the duo was together over a decade before releasing their first CD in 1993.

While they have achieved much in learning to play to play as a tight ensemble, they have never consciously tried to be homogeneous according to Pearl. "We have never thought a guitar duo should sound like one instrument with 12 strings played by one person with 20 fingers," he says. "We think more about interaction, but we are careful to balance things so that the musical image is a unified one. We feel we each have a personal identity."

While many nonclassical players view playing written music as restrictive, Gray and Pearl find overwhelming freedom in the classical idiom. "The most thrilling part of being a musician is starting the interpretive process with a new piece," says Gray. "We come to rehearsal after learning our parts and it feels like there is a clean slate—we could do anything with the piece. It reminds you how explorational being a musician is. It draws on all of your resources, every human faculty. You have to use intelligence, your emotional life, your sense of the spirit of a piece, and you need physical skill. You have to excerise all of them at the highest level. It is like sculpting, you chip away until it comes close to your idea."

Over the next year, Gray and Pearl will be shaping their transcriptions of music by 19th century composers such as Brahms, Schubert, and Mendelsohn. They will also include some romantic sounding 20th century works by Albeniz and Shostakovich. They also hope to publish some of their transcriptions.

Gray and Pearl are never in a hurry to release the next album, so it is no coincidence that their recordings stand the test of time. "We always want the finished product to be something that we could be proud of years after the fact," says Pearl. "Hearing our older recordings, I find things that I would do differently now, but I am satisfied with the manner in which we played. For me, I like to know that I did as much as I could to make a piece expressive and beautiful. If I ever got to the point where I felt I was just phoning my part in, it would be time to hang it up."