by Daniel Hathaway
A classical guitar concert of mostly Russian music held on St. Patrick’s Day in a rustic lodge in a national park —with stuffed bison heads staring down at you! Disconnects sometimes make for really successful concerts, as they did last Sunday when guitarist Gideon Whitehead performed at Happy Days Lodge in Cuyahoga Valley National Park under the joint auspices of Music by Nature and the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society.
Whitehead, a Michigander who studied at CIM and is now pursuing an artist diploma at the Curtis Institute with Jason Vieux and David Starobin, appeared as part of CCGS’s Local Artists and Rising Stars Series.
Each half of his cleverly-constructed program began with a suite (Sylvius Leopold Weiss’s real baroque Partita in g and Paul Lansky’s witty modern knock-off, Semi-Suite), proceeded to an evocative set of variations, Sergei Rudnev’s on The Old Lime Tree, or a narrative work, Nikita Koshkin’s Usher Waltz, and ended with a tone poem, Grigori Korchmar’s White Nights Serenade and Agustin Barrios Mangoré’s La Catedral. [Read more…]
