by Mike Telin
When selecting works for a program, classical guitarists Thomas Flippin and Christopher Mallett are always asking themselves if they are being inclusive — are they including works by composers who are not usually represented on classical guitar concerts.
On Saturday, November 15 at 7:30 pm at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, the adventurous Duo Noire will return to the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society’s International series with a program that will include three world premieres along with other recent commissions and arrangements of music by J.S. Bach, Nathaniel Dett, Domenico Scarlatti, Astor Piazzolla, Justin Holland, and Thomas Flippin. Tickets are available online.
“What’s cool about this program is that we have new pieces by a Middle Eastern jazz fusion composer, a film composer, and a jazz pianist who does weird stuff with 8-bit video game music on his albums,” Thomas Flippin said during a Zoom conversation with his duo partner. “All of that is really interesting to us.”
The Duo noted that the program’s premieres came to light while they were searching for composers to commission pieces from for their new album.
“Casimir Liberski is a jazz pianist. I first came across him when my wife gave me his album Cosmic Liberty, and it completely blew my mind,” Mallett said. “So I’ve been following his career and saw that he’s been composing a lot of really interesting music. I decided to reach out to him and he got back immediately saying, ‘I’ve been wanting to write something for the guitar.”
The Duo will play the fourth movement, “Zanshin,” of the 30-minute work. The title is a concept in Japanese martial arts for a relaxed and alert state of mind.
“We like to commission composers who are not guitarists, and whose music is outside of the box,” Flippin said. “What’s cool is that Casimir came up with something that I have never heard on the classical guitar in terms of textures, rhythms, and harmonies. As a jazz pianist, he has an incredible concept of harmony. There’s also some great interplay between the guitars, like some insane hocketing and things that you would never hear in a normal classical guitar concert, which I think is refreshing.
Flippin met Bryan Senti when they were classmates in graduate school. “He’s had tremendous success as a film composer,” Flippin said. “A few years ago he won a BAFTA, which is the British equivalent of an Academy Award for film composing. I told him how much I loved his music and hoped that one day he would write for us — and he did.”
Lingua Quebrada has a groove that is a little bit off, Flippin noted. “Instead of a straight beat that you can lock in on, he notated it in 25/16 so there’s this one 16th note that messes everything up. But it has cool textures, atmospheric harmonics, and a rock-out groove. What I like about it is that it’s super accessible for the audience.”
Mallett said that Layale Chaker is a French/Lebanese composer and violinist whose works are a blend of jazz, classical, and Middle Eastern music. “It’s all fused together to create something that I’ve really never heard before. But out of the three premieres, Bound and Undone is probably the most traditional. It’s in 4/4 most of the time, but has a lot of groove.”
“Her music is unique because of her background, so a lot of the scales and modes she’s using come from that ethos,” Flippin said. “But then she has a jazz band, and she’s collaborated with string quartets like Ethel. And we love that fusion of sound worlds that have never been done before on the guitar.”
Mallett said he has a high scale passage and before he started practicing it, he thought about emailing her to say it was too hard. “But then I sat down and thought ‘All right, it’s doable.’ One thing about working with non-guitar composers is that you’re constantly trying to figure out these scales that are not idiomatic to the guitar. But in the end you become a better player, and a better listener.”
Duo Noire look forward to presenting Nathalie Joachim’s Held Together, which they said is the perfect example of what they look for in a piece.
“It’s different from anything that’s been done on the classical guitar before,” Flippin said. “It has a backing track of her singing and layering her vocals on top of each other. And we’ve got a click track in our ears because the meter is changing constantly. It’s incredibly difficult. Chris has an insanely virtuosic opening — it’s just one, two, three, four, go. She wrote it during the pandemic when she was isolated in her apartment in Chicago and she kept telling herself ‘If I can just keep it together, I can get through this.’ You’ll hear that refrain constantly. It ends in a really profound way with just the guitars. I’m excited about it, and audiences overwhelmingly love this piece.”
The program also includes three of Gity Razaz’s Four Haikus. “The second movement is this really cool motif that we trade off with little interruptions in between,” Mallett said. “The third is by far my favorite of the pieces that have been commissioned for us. It’s beautiful, dark, mysterious, and well-crafted. And the fourth movement is really energetic, trading off parts with lots of scales.”
“Courtney Bryan’s Soli Deo Gloria is profoundly gorgeous,” Flippin said. “It’s based on the multiple parts of a prayer. If you read the score she calls one part meditative, calming and relaxing.”
Bryan, who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2023, earned a doctorate in composition from Columbia University. “She lives in the classical world but I’ve also seen her in New Orleans jamming at a jazz club,” Flippin said. “She’s an insanely talented musician. The piece sounds improvisatory — it has a melodic line that sounds like a jazz solo. And there’s this crazy middle part where we’re playing percussion on the guitars.”
“That came about because she was sitting at the piano just rumbling the lower notes,” Mallett said. “Then she asked, ‘How can I get this sound on the guitar?’ “We started tapping on the strings and on the body of the guitar, and she said, ‘That’s it.’ So it’s cool to see how these sounds that the composers hear on their own instrument can translate to the guitar and turn into something they didn’t originally want but actually works really well and is idiomatic on our instrument.”
Mallett, who has recorded the music of Justin Holland, said, “You can’t come to Cleveland without playing some of his music.” Holland was a black musician and composer best known for his works on the guitar. He attended Oberlin and spent most of his adult life in Cleveland. He is credited with 35 original works for the guitar and 300 published arrangements.
“The piece that we’ll be playing is one of Holland’s arrangements from Scraps of the Opera. His publisher would ask him to take popular operas and combine the themes into a three-movement medley. We’re super excited to play the duo guitar version of “Oberon.”
The program will open with Flippin’s Delmar Blvd Blues, a short piece he wrote for the St. Louis Guitar Society. “It’s just a straight ahead, jazzy blues piece that makes a great show opener. It’s fun, it’s light, and it gets us comfortable on stage — like an invitation to get the concert started.”
Published on ClevelandClassical.com November 13, 2025.
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