Romantic guitar revealed

Rucco-James Duo to evoke 19th century ethos in March 19 concert - Program
By Paul Bonner (from the recent TGS Newsletter emailed to members)

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

The guitar music everybody knows remains in some ways hidden to us, behind two centuries of reinterpretation and evolution of the instrument itself.
    All that modern accretion the duo of Pasquale Rucco and Douglas James will strip away to reveal the glory of what many regard as the guitar’s first great golden age, in a TGS concert March 19 at 7 p.m. on Konnectclub.com. Tickets are $12; half-price for current TGS members (join or renew on line).
    The Rucco-James Duo has long engaged in a quest, in fact, for the essence of historically informed performance of the early Romantic period’s repertoire. They play period and reproduction guitars, strung with gut. Their performances are informed by a combined two lifetimes of research into the period’s musical life and an enduring run of concertizing together.

The Performers

Their collaboration represents, moreover, the convergence of a global journey, with Rucco coming over the seas from his home in Naples, Italy, and James from over the North Carolina mountains from Boone, where he is a professor of guitar at Appalachian State University. They are playing a series of concerts in the United States this spring, beginning in Annapolis, Md., on March 12 and ending with the performance for TGS on the 19th, which will be webcast on Konnectclub live from TGS President Randy Reed’s Chapel Hill home.
    Their partnership began when both were students of Carlo Barone, an Italian classical guitarist, expert on Romantic guitar performance practice, and director of Accademia l’Ottocento, which documents and publishes music of the period. It took place in Stresa, a resort town on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy.
    “And we started our activity first over there,” Rucco said in an joint interview recently. “Then I invited Doug to the Naples area for some concerts, and he invited me to....” “Tucson, in Arizona,” James supplied.
    They also concertized in northern Italy and then all over Europe and the United States.
    “It was easy because Douglas is a very good friend, kind of a brother for me,” Rucco said. “We enjoy each other. He likes to stay in Italy, I like to stay in America, so we decided to become a duo. And here we are.”
    “We’ve been playing as a duo now for 27 years,” James added.

Douglas James, left, and Pasquale Rucco play March 19

Both men’s solo and pedagogical accomplishments also are remarkable. At App State, James also directs the Appalachian State GuitarFest, which celebrates its 25th “Silver Edition” this spring (see Also of Note on page 5). James has won top prize in the Arturo Toscanini Solo Guitar Competition in Italy and has been twice awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Recitalist Fellowship. He has recorded a solo album of Italian early Romantic guitar music.
    Rucco also has won the Arturo Toscanini Solo Guitar Competition and several other European guitar competitions. He is the founding director of a consortium of music academies in and around Naples.
    Together, the duo has recorded two albums, A Night at the Opera and Early Romantic Music for Two Guitars. Among their many performance venues have been the Guitar Foundation of America, Guitar-Festival Iserlohn, Stetson International Guitar Summer Workshop, Sorrento GuitarFest, Oberlin Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Early Music Houston.

The Instruments

In the concert, James will play primarily a guitar in the French Mirecourt style made by luthier Jacques Derazey between 1830 and 1836, ornately inlaid around the binding and sound hole with mother of pearl.
    “This would have been sold in Paris during Fernando Sor’s time there,” James said.
    He’ll also be using a 10-string guitar from the 1840s made by Johann Anton Stauffer. It is characterized by a relatively thin body, a fretboard that floats above the top, and a neck adjusting screw in the heel that is turned with a clock key.
    (Modern American guitarists may better identify with Stauffer through the legacy of his father, Johann Georg Stauffer. Specifically, they probably recognize at least the name of the elder Stauffer’s young apprentice in Vienna who later emigrated to America and in 1833 began building guitars under his own name: C.F. Martin.)
    Rucco will be playing another Mirecourt-style guitar from the same period or slightly later. And he’ll use a reproduction of a period terz guitar made by South Carolina guitarist-luthier James Buckland. A terz guitar is smaller than a standard guitar and tuned a minor third higher. Many duo compositions from the period feature the combination of a standard and terz guitar, James explained.
    Often, the duo emulates a soloist with orchestral accompaniment, with many based on well-known operatic arias. The melodic part is played by the terz guitar and the accompaniment on the standard guitar.
    “As an Italian, you understand easily, my culture is particularly the opera, so I was growing up between [Gioacchino] Rossini, [Giuseppe] Verdi, and [Giacomo] Puccini,” Rucco said. “And this is what we are trying to do: to present the music of the 19th century for guitar in the same quality and with the same dignità, we say in Italian — elegance and fascination — of the opera music.”

The Music

The program may include the Grand Duo, Op. 31, No. 3, by Antoine de Lhoyer; two Rossini aria adaptations by Anton Diabelli; Rondeau alla Pollacca, Op. 30 (from Guitar Concerto No. 1), and Variazioni Concertanti, Op. 130, both by Mauro Giuliani; and an arrangement by Giuliani of the overture of the Barber of Seville by Rossini.
    Probably the least known of those composers is Diabelli, who, however, was a major figure in the 19th century music publishing world — he published
Romantic guitar revealed Ludwig van Beethoven’s (and some of Giuliani’s) compositions — and was an accomplished guitarist and composer for the instrument in his own right.
    Besides operatic adaptations, another typical form is the grand duo, a concertante style that could often feature guitar and another instrument, or two guitars.
    “The de Lhoyer is the last movement of one of three grand duos that he did, big duo pieces,” James said. “And it’s an allegro-rondo, so it’s just a nice, lively opener.”
The period’s musical style could be called mannered, and some proficiency in it would have been considered among the social graces of a genteel person or aspirant to that status.
“At that time, every family of medium-high level in the society needed to have someone that was able to play, in a good quality, an instrument,” Rucco said. “And the guitar was one of the favorites at that time.”
    Yet it would be a mistake to consider this music merely polite or facile. Several works on the program, for example, are each over 10 minutes long, with many intricate variations that impose considerable demands on the player, James noted.
    “There is certainly a misconception that has been around for a while that the 19th century music is light and maybe inconsequential,” James said. “But I would also say its kind of hard to play — ‘Let's hear you do it’ would be my response. Then it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t play that stuff.’ It’s like a pianist saying they don’t play Beethoven.”
    And just as no modern pianist, without study and practice, possesses the required touch and sensibilities to perform on an early 19th century fortepiano, a guitarist, even if adept at playing the modern instrument, would have to make many adjustments to play a period guitar well.
    “They don’t respond the same way; they don’t sound exactly the same way,” James said. “And you have to treat them on their own terms.”
    Put another way, shredding on these guitars is always at hand — literally.
    “You can’t play a gut string exactly the same way you play a nylon string, or you’ll shred it instantly,” James said. “So there’s all sorts of things to consider.”
    In that and other ways, TGS members and others tuning in to the March 19 concert will get to hear these pieces in much the way audiences would have in a Parisian salon of the early to mid-19th century.
“We feel pretty confident that we’re presenting it in the way it would have been done,” James said.