A world-class music event returns to the region this weekend when the URI Guitar Festival takes over the Kingston campus and nearby venues. The festival continues to grow and expand under the leadership of Artistic Director and guitarist Adam Levin, who founded the festival in 2015. Click here for the full list of concerts and tickets.
The festival includes seven concerts over five days, with an impressive lineup of performers coming from as far away as Argentina, Israel, Greece, France, and Australia. Although the focus is on classical music, performers also include blues great Jontavious Willis and jazz guitarist Jay Azzolina. The schedule includes workshops, demonstrations, the Rising Stars Young Guitarist Program, and a mandolin course – the event is balanced evenly between performance and instruction.
Highlights this year include Levin’s Great Necks Guitar Trio performing a world premiere of a newly commissioned work, “A Thousand Lives,” by Composer-in-Residence Mathias Duplessy. This year’s event has an international focus, with concerts themed around nations and regions – “Costa Rica Meets Greece” and “Argentina meets Contemporary Italy.”
I recently spoke to Nicolo Spera, who is playing as part of “Italian Night” on Friday, October 20, at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, alongside artists Elisa La Marca and Mauro Zanatta. Spera teaches classical guitar at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “My career is performing and teaching and trying to be a good daddy,” he joked in our phone chat.
Spera offered a preview of what to expect at the concert. “Adam (Levin) had this amazing idea of having three very different people who represent Italian music from three different perspectives. I know both quite well; Elisa La Marca is from Milan, like I am; she is an amazing guitarist,” said Spera. La Marca also plays the lute and other instruments from that family. “She is one of the most musical beings I have ever met and a great advocate of early music; it will be a very enchanting evening.
“Mauro Zanatta, I met in Spain, he is a phenomenal player, very strong,” said Spera. Zanatta has won competitions worldwide on the traditional six-string classical guitar and a rare 13-string guitar that he designed himself.
“I may be the most challenging segment of the evening,” added Spera, who plays traditional six-string as well as more exotic instruments like the 10-string guitar and the theorbo. “One piece is by Giacomo Susani, a young guitarist/composer/conductor from northern Italy. It is a piece inspired by Western visual art, from the beginning of the 14th century.”
Spero has performed around the world, on historic European concert stages, and in small towns in Colorado. He noted that you don’t have to be a connoisseur of classical music to enjoy these shows. “Sometimes, in the United States, I’ve found some of the most generally excited audiences I could possibly wish for,” he noted.
How does classical music survive in the TikTok generation? Spera shared his thoughts. “Perhaps I’m naïve,” he explained. “I believe to not undermine its importance, it has to stay challenging. I don’t think the solution to classical music is to make it less challenging, meaning I’m not very fond of reducing classical music to the TikTok experience. Of course, we can’t escape it; it’s hopefully a good way to get young people interested in what we do. Classical music has never reached big audiences; it may never reach them, but when it does reach a small audience, it is a life-changing experience. To make it a mixed experience, sort of like a pop/funny thing, I think that will kill classical music rather than help it.”
Spera offers some advice to aspiring students (other than practice, practice, practice). “I would say find your own voice and be true to your own heart, don’t give in to shortcuts or what other people say, just be true to yourself.”
The concerts are open to all this weekend – Click here for further information and tickets to the festival.
