Sanford Baran of KGNU interviews classical guitarist Sharon Isbin, highlighting her achievements and influence in classical music, including founding the guitar departments at Juilliard and the Aspen Music Festival. Sharon discusses her upcoming recital at the Aspen Music Festival on July 30th, featuring a diverse program. Sharon shares insights on her collaborations with various artists across genres and how these enrich her music. She reflects on her prolific recording career, emphasizing the conceptual nature of her albums, and discusses her new album “Live in Aspen” with Amjad Ali Khan and his sons.
Sanford Baran: Today we’re delighted to be speaking with the renowned classical guitarist Sharon Isbin. Sharon is the founder of the guitar departments at both Juilliard and the Aspen Music Festival, highlighting her immense influence in the world of classical music. Her prolific career includes Grammy winning recordings, groundbreaking collaborations, and an extensive repertoire that spans centuries and cultures. She and colleagues will be in recital at the Aspen Music Festival on Tuesday, July 30th, 6 p.m. at Harris Hall. Sharon, it’s a real pleasure to have you with us.
Sharon Isbin: Thank you, Sanford, a joy to talk with you.
Sanford Baran: You’ve had an illustrious career with numerous achievements. What initially drew you to the guitar, and how did your passion for the instrument develop over time?
Sharon Isbin: I would have to say I’m an accidental guitarist. When I was nine years old, our family moved to Italy. My father, being a scientist, was asked to be a consultant for a project there, and my oldest brother said he wanted guitar lessons. My parents got excited because the teacher had studied with Segovia, and was touring all over Italy, but when my brother met him and realized it was classical, he said, no way, I want to be Elvis Presley. So, I volunteered to take his place, and that’s how it started at the age of nine in Italy. My first teacher was Aldo Minella, who was actually a friend of Oscar Ghiglia. Aldo also studied with Segovia at the master classes that Gillia did, and for me it was just a hobby for that first year in Italy. When we moved back to Minneapolis, where I grew up, I began to focus on other kinds of things, like science. My father used to bribe me and say, you can’t go launch your model rockets until you put an hour on the guitar.
So that kept me fueled with music for a little bit. When I was 14 I won a competition, and the award with the Minnesota Orchestra was to perform as soloist with the orchestra for over 10,000 people. I just had an overnight lightbulb experience thinking, my goodness, after that, this is more exciting than sending my worms and grasshoppers up into space. I’m going to become a guitarist. So that formative transition happened at the age of 14, and I really began to dedicate myself. I began studies with Oscar Ghiglia around that same time. He had created the first guitar department in 1969 at the Aspen Music Festival, so I was fortunate to study with him for five summers in the 70s. When I was 17 years old, he invited me to be his teaching assistant at Aspen. Fast forward, around that same time, I had my first of several lessons with Andres Segovia. I eventually took over the Aspen Music Festival department after an 8 year hiatus where there was no guitar department. And I’ve been directing that ever since 1993.
Sanford Baran: Your upcoming recital at the Aspen Music Festival features a diverse and intriguing program. Can you tell us more about the pieces you’ve selected and the overall theme or story you aim to convey through this performance?
Sharon Isbin: I was very honored when the festival asked me to be one of four reminiscence programs, which they gave to artists who have been part of the festival for many years, and who have storytelling to share with the audience as part of the musical experience. I opened with three duets from the Renaissance period with a wonderful student of mine who just graduated from Juilliard, Alan Liu, getting his master’s there. These are three duets that I recorded with myself on an album that won a Grammy called Journey to the New World. That was an exploration of folk music from the British Isles on through to the New World with Joan Baez as a guest and Mark O’Connor as well. That sets the stage for sharing my love of teaching as well as performing.
I transition to a work by Leo Brouwer that he composed for me called “El Decamarón Negro”. These are love stories collected in Africa by a German ethnologist named Leo Frobenius, and they describe a warrior who is much beloved by his tribe and then banished because of his desire to play the harp. A metaphor for many things that we can imagine in our societies today. It ends with a third ballad called “The Maiden in Love”. I go to a work by Agustin Barrios Mangore from Paraguay. He was nicknamed “The Paganini of The Jungles of Paraguay”, and I chose to include that on this particular program as well because it gives me a chance to tell a fun story about my lessons with Andres Segovia, which relates to this.
The final work on the program, this is the Tuesday, July 30th program at the Aspen Music Festival, is the beautiful concerto by Joaquin Rodrigo called “Concierto de Aranjuez”. It’s a magical work. I chose it for this particular concert because it honors the 25th anniversary of Rodrigo’s passing. I was fortunate to have a 20 year friendship with him. We met when he heard my live radio broadcast of the Concierto de Aranjuez, when I was a winner of the Queen Sofia competition in Madrid. So he invited me to his home. I met him and his lovely wife, Victoria, played the concerto with him, studied it with him, and that was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship with one of the most revered Spanish composers of our time.
The piece is one that is so moving for people. That second movement, the Adagio, is something that brings tears to people’s eyes. They often don’t know why, but it relates to a time in Rodrigo’s life. When his wife had lost what would have been their first child, he was trying to console himself with this beautiful Adagio theme, which he had already composed, but very likely the emotion of that affected his orchestration, and it ends with three harmonics that are said to be the soul of their child ascending to heaven. So it’s a work I’ve been fortunate to record several times, including with the New York Philharmonic, which had a Latin Grammy nomination, and it’s a work that I feel very close to, and that I love sharing with audiences.
Sanford Baran: How did this collaboration come about, and what was it like to have a piece written with your playing style and, of course, you in mind?
Sharon Isbin: Well, the funny thing about this is that I had no idea Brouwer was writing it for me. We’d never discussed it. We met at the Toronto competition in 1975, which I happened to win, and which was the first real exposure of Brouwer to a large North American audience when he performed his recital and I fell in love with his music, began to play it and record it. Brower knew about that. And then one day I received in the mail in 1989 a package with this handwritten score of “El Decamarón Negro”. I was just so amazed and honored to know that he had been thinking about me and wanted to do this. We later got together in Europe, and I’ve been performing this. I recorded it most recently on my album called Affinity, which came out in 2020, and that is an album that celebrates world premiere recordings and music written for me, and it also includes the magnificent concerto that Chris Brubeck, son of Dave Brubeck, wrote for me, called “Affinity”.
It has music by Richard Danielpour as well, a lovely duet with a special new second guitar part that is inspired by the music of Antonio Lauro, his “Natalia Waltz”. When I actually played in Caracas one time, I was playing this waltz and all of a sudden heard a second guitar part that was infused with that beautiful folk element of Venezuelan folk music. Who do you think was playing that second guitar part? It was Natalia herself, Lauro’s daughter, to whom he had dedicated the piece. So years later I had asked one of my students, Cullen Davin, to set a second guitar part when I learned he was an amazing arranger. It was so beautiful, I invited him to join me on the Affinity album, so you’ll hear that as well. And of course, on that album is music by Tan Dun, the great Chinese American composer. This is his “Seven Desires for Guitar”, where the guitar desires to be a pipa. So I’ve taken you on a little bit of a tangent here, but all of that relates to “El Decamerón Negro”, which is featured on Affinity.
Sanford Baran: You’ve collaborated with a diverse array of artists across many genres. How do these cross genre collaborations come about, and how do these inform and enrich you musically?
Sharon Isbin: I began working with jazz artists and bossa nova artists long ago. The first time was really when I was invited by Larry Coryell and Laurindo Almeida, the master of bossa nova from Brazil, to be part of a trio with them. They would compose pieces for us, we would go on tours and record. So all of that really became a very natural thing. I then had collaborations with other Brazilian musicians like Romero Lubambo, Thiago de Mello, who plays Brazilian organic handheld percussion. So for almost 20 years, I was used to performing with percussion. That was a magical experience. Joan Baez, Mark O’Connor, on an album called Sharon Isbin & Friends: Guitar Passion, I was able to invite some of my heroes, like Steve Vai to join me, and Nancy Wilson from Heart.
How does this change my experience? Well, when I first started doing concerts together in this crossover vein, crossover was kind of a dirty word in those days, and of course now it’s the big thing. For me, it was not at all about a commercial venture, but really more about an exciting and exhilarating musical experience where I get to experience a genre that is quite different from what I’m used to and find a way for our worlds to meet.
Sanford Baran: You’ve built a prolific legacy of recordings and commissions. How do you select the works you choose to record? And what’s it like taking these on?
Sharon Isbin: All of my albums, for the most part, have a concept to them, whether it’s folk music, which was dreams of a world. That was the first Grammy that I won, and how did that happen? I was just compiling in the corner of my living room, beautiful music that I someday wanted to play and record, and I suddenly realized all of it was connected to folk music, so that became the album. And, in the case of “Journey to the Amazon”, I was working with a wonderful artist from Brazil who had actually developed his rhythmic skills by being a famous soccer coach. He worked with Pelé in Brazil. When we went on tour in Europe, he’d point to stadiums and say, oh my goodness, I played there with Pelé. For me, just being open to new experiences and being appreciative of what people are contributing to the world artistically has given me the possibility of a really expansive career.
Sanford Baran: And speaking of recordings, at the end of June you released a new album titled Live in Aspen, featuring Amjad Ali Khan, Amaan Ali Bangesh, and Ayaan Ali Bangesh. Could you share more about the inspiration behind this album and the nature of this collaboration?
Sharon Isbin: Fifteen years ago, I received an email from Amjad Ali Khan, who is considered the foremost sarod player in India and actually in the world. Sarod is also a plucked instrument. It has a metal fingerboard with no frets and the body, made of wood, is covered with animal skin and it’s played with a plectrum. So it’s quite different from the guitar, but the blend is something really unique and special. He wrote to me and said he would like to collaborate, and I said, well, this sounds like a fascinating idea. We met, I heard him and his sons, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangesh in concert in New York. They represent the 7th generation in their family lineage of the evolution of the sarod. And so I said, yes, let’s do it. I said, there’s one hitch. You have to be able to notate my part in traditional notation.
That proved to be a stumbling block, so every year we would meet, hear them, we’d share a friendship, and I was convinced after 10 years this was never going to happen, but that was okay. I loved their music. I had, as a college student, fallen in love with North Indian classical music as a listener. So then one day, this was in December of 2018, all of these ragas suddenly appeared in my inbox. And this is 10 years after he had first written for me. I wrote back and I said, these are gorgeous, just beautiful music. He said, good, because we booked a tour to do with you in two months throughout India. And I said, well, that’s so exciting, but couldn’t I have a little more time to assimilate all of this? They said, no, the halls were available, including big halls in Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, let’s do it. So I changed my whole schedule around and it proved to be a really magnificent collaboration.
We did our tour in 2019. We said we had to make a recording, which was our first album, Strings for Peace, released in 2020. Then I was able to invite them as my guests to the Aspen Music Festival where I’ve been performing every summer since 1993. So we performed in 2022. A couple of months later, Ayaan listened to the recording of the archival that they do for all their concerts. He said, my God, this is an album. I said, really? So I listened. I said, you’re right. We had a sold out house that evening. The energy from the audience was just palpable, so exciting. And it really fueled a tremendous part of the concert, and you can hear it in the album. We just took that, we got permission from the festival, it was released in June of this year in time for the 75th anniversary of the Aspen Music Festival, and it’s titled Live in Aspen.
For me, after going to India, and rehearsing with the Khans, and preparing the music, and using melismatic elements that for me were definitely related in some way to Spanish music that I was familiar with, but that was very much a part of North Indian classical music and the improvisation aspect of that and adding that to my part and accompanying the others when they would improvise, because there’s a lot of improvisation. No concert is ever the same when we perform. I had this epiphany the first night playing in India, when I opened with a Spanish solo, “Asturias” by Albéniz, which I had performed hundreds and hundreds of times, but suddenly I was hearing it with new ears with this whole tradition of the Roma somehow entering into my radar and my brain waves and musical spirit. And it was just an incredible illumination of a new experience and a new way of hearing and playing Spanish music.
Sanford Baran: As a trailblazer in the classical guitar world, what advice would you give to young musicians aspiring to follow in your footsteps?
Sharon Isbin: It’s of course important that everybody has a good teacher from the start so they get good training and to continue that in their more advanced work. And then they have to have something to say. They have to be passionate about music, about their love for the instruments, and wanting to contribute something that no one else has done before. Many of my students from other countries, I’ve encouraged them to explore working with composers from those countries, making arrangements of music so that they can bring to the literature something no one else has done before. For me, it’s been often by example, they get inspired by my work. I’ve had more than 80 works composed for me and arranged for me by very prominent composers from different countries. So, I think that they have followed that example in getting works written for them and many wonderful things are happening in that regard.
Sanford Baran: Finally, upcoming projects or collaborations are you most excited about? What can your fans look forward to in the near future?
Sharon Isbin: To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States in 2026, I’m offering six of the concerti written for me by American composers. From Chris Rouse to John Coriano, Tan Dunn if you consider him Chinese American, and others as well, so that I can help be part of that celebration with magnificent pieces that I have brought to the fore composed for me. Right now I am preparing a recording that I’ll be doing in October called “The Miami Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra”. I premiered the first part of that with the National Symphony Orchestra last fall on their annual concert tour. A Labor Day concert at the U. S. Capitol for over 10,000 people on the Capitol lawn. That was very, very exciting. So I’ll be recording this. That’ll come out sometime in 2025.
Sanford Baran: Sharon, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your incredible journey and insights into the world of classical guitar. It’s been a true pleasure to hear about your experiences and upcoming recital at the Aspen Music Festival. We wish you all the best in your performance and future endeavors. Thank you again for your time and inspiring conversation.
Sharon Isbin: Thank you, Sanford. It’s been a joy talking with you and always a pleasure to come back to the mountains here.
