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The Story of Miloš Karadaglić

 

An in-depth, personal account on Miloš Karadaglić – spanning his journey from an eight year old learning guitar in Montenegro to how he has become “the hottest property in classical music today.” (West Australian)

If you were asked to name classical music’s most legendary guitar players, you’d probably come up with Andres Segovia, Julian Bream and John Williams. Miloš Karadaglić, born in 1983, who is already being hailed by fans and critics for his brilliant technique and transcendent musicality, may well be on his way to joining them. With two recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, he aims to start bringing a new sense of excitement, and new waves of listeners, to the classical guitar.

“My motto is: there are no problems, only challenges!” declared the young musician from Montenegro, a small country on the Adriatic Sea which once formed part of Yugoslavia.

Coming from a homeland with no real classical guitar tradition and a population of only 600,000, the challenges faced by Miloš if he was to climb the international guitar-playing ladder were daunting. At least he comes from a family of music lovers, even though none of his relatives are musicians (both his parents are economists, and his younger brother is currently studying for a Masters’ degree in economics in Madrid).

Before he first wrapped his fingers round a guitar, he had already displayed a natural aptitude for singing.

“Music was very much loved in my family, by my parents and my grandmother,” he recalls. “They really encouraged me to sing because the voice is something that comes most naturally. Then when I was eight I said ‘I really want to learn properly and go to a music school’, and there was only one place, which was the music school in Podgorica.”

Miloš comfortably passed the audition, but then came the problem of what instrument he should study. He picked the guitar because it proved to be the most practical choice.

“I liked the piano very much but my parents said it was too expensive to have one. Then I liked the violin too, but they said ‘oh, that would be really painful for us!’”

Guitar-wise, the first, and unlikely, object of his desire was an ancient instrument which his father had once been given by his older brother.

“It was a really ugly old black guitar which had been forgotten about and was sitting on top of the cupboard in my parents’ bedroom,” he recalls. “It had missing strings, it was all dusty and it was terrible. I said ‘can you give me that, I just want to feel it.’ I vividly remember this scene, the moment when I picked it up for the first time and pretended to be a rock star. I said ‘this is what I want to play’.”

But he didn’t play it in a rock ’n ’roll style. Miloš studied strictly classical guitar from day one, according to the program laid down by the state music school.

“It was still kind of Communist then, so there were no private teachers. If you were talented you went to the music school and had sol-fa teaching for the voice, and worked on the instrument you had chosen. This was for six years.”

The early Nineties weren’t the best of times for the Balkans. Although Montenegro didn’t suffer the kind of horrors that were visited on Bosnia or Kosovo, it didn’t escape unscathed.

“War was happening all around,” says Miloš. “Montenegro was a part of Yugoslavia and politically it wanted to stay in Yugoslavia, so it was dragged into the conflict. It was the scariest time. I remember the father of some children I played with was killed in the war, so it affected everybody indirectly. I was lucky to have the most unbelievable parents. All the shops were empty and everything was so depressing, but with the little they had they tried to make my brother and myself feel like princes.”

For Miloš and his family, music provided reassurance and escape: “I remember once there was a power cut and we were trying to keep warm. My mum said ‘why don’t you bring your guitar and play something for us?’ It was like the music kept us going.”

Meanwhile, Miloš’s playing was developing at a stunning speed. He had never been afraid to perform in public, and as his skills improved he was quick to display them in front of audiences. He had begun making appearances in major concert halls by the time he was 14.

“It was all happening extremely fast and there was a great sense of achievement. I was thrown into concerts and given ridiculously hard pieces to play, but I coped and I always loved it. As soon as I could play a piece I had to play it in front of a thousand people. I think all these experiences in my childhood not only made me a happy person, but also left me equipped for whatever is happening right now. Without the audience I am not complete. The audience makes me come alive.”

During the war years, the Montenegrins felt isolated from the outside world and weren’t able to travel beyond their own borders. But at last the hostilities ceased, and the restrictions eased. In 1996, Miloš was invited to play a concert in Paris, and his trip there remains one of his most special and magical memories.

“I just played a small concert in Paris, but it was my first chance to get out of my country and see the happy Western world,” he says, lighting up at the recollection. “I remember my mother and myself walking around the streets of Paris, and suddenly we were in the Champs Elysées. It was just before Christmas and the whole city was lit up. I was just drawn to the shops and their windows. I thought ‘my God, this is how life should be, in full colour.’”

It was in Paris too that Miloš bought his first serious guitar, a Jose Ramirez instrument would that help him take his playing to the next level. “My parents gave all their savings so I could buy that guitar,” he says. “It’s another reason why I see Paris as such a magical place.”

Another turning point came when he travelled to Italy to meet the classical guitarist David Russell, who was giving masterclasses. The ambitious Miloš wanted to measure himself against one of the guitar’s top practitioners.

“There was a big international competition going on at the same time,” he remembers, “and all these older students were watching this kid playing so fast and so clean, and I thought ‘hmm, they’re looking at me!’ I started to feel important. Then I played for David Russell, and he said I was very good and should keep working.”

When Miloš asked where the best place was in the world to study classical guitar, Russell promptly advised him to go to London and aim to enroll at the Royal Academy of Music, as Russell himself had done.

The advice struck home. Miloš made the fateful decision that he would specialize in music for his next two years at secondary school.

“It’s a huge choice to make when you’re 14, but that’s how the system works. Everyone was saying ‘he must do music’, but on the other hand I was also a good student in science and the humanities. But I decided to dedicate my life to music.”

Determined to get himself to London and the RAM, Miloš applied himself single-mindedly to improving his technique and building up his repertoire, winning every available competition in Yugoslavia and taking additional lessons in Belgrade. He had gone as far as he could go in his homeland.

“I decided I would send my material to London. I chose five of my best pieces and recorded a tape of them, and sent it to the Royal Academy. After two months I hadn’t heard anything. My mother said ‘you’re only 16, you can try again next year’, but I refused to accept it.”

Plucking up his courage, he telephoned the Academy, and asked what had happened to his application: “The lady said ‘wait a minute’, and then she came back and said ‘it’s wonderful news! Didn’t you get our letter? You’ve been accepted, the head of studies Michael Lewin will teach you, and you will have a scholarship of such-and-such amount of money. See you in September, bye!’”

So, just turned 17, Miloš found himself starting a new life in a strange city. His father accompanied him to London, and was there to give his son a shoulder to cry on when the enormity of what he was about to embark upon briefly overwhelmed him. Fortunately, his teacher, Professor Michael Lewin, understood what he was going through.

“He was the nicest person,” says Miloš, “and he said ‘if I didn’t know that you are more than good enough to do this, I wouldn’t have done this to you and your family because I know what it means. We’ll take it one step at a time and you will achieve everything’. For me, from then on, everything was fine.”

Despite his undoubted gifts, Miloš quickly discovered that he didn’t know everything about the classical guitar after all. His teachers in Montenegro hadn’t been true guitar specialists, and various imperfections had crept into his technique.

“Michael Lewin gave me a little study by Fernando Sor, and the Sor studies were pieces I had digested in my first year of guitar playing. Then we had the lesson, and I realized that actually I could not do everything that he asked me to. I had to start again and listen and work. Often Michael had to slowly adjust my hand positions, while still preserving the spirit of the music. For the next four years at the Academy I worked and practiced – so many levels, so many different concerts, deadlines and preparations. It was very intense and I didn’t do anything apart from practicing and sleeping.”

Eventually, Miloš graduated with First Class honours in June 2004. Then he continued his studies with a two-year Masters’ degree in Performance, in which he achieved a Distinction. Following that, he became the first guitarist ever to be made a Meaker Junior Fellow of the RAM, which gave him a further two years’ breathing space to study and perform.

Emerging into the world of professional musicianship, he notched up prestigious appearances at the Lucerne Festival, the Wigmore Hall and the Purcell Room. He had also brought his prize-winning ways to London, collecting the Ivor Mairants Award in 2002 and the Julian Bream Prize (awarded by Bream himself) in 2005. He was also the first guitarist to win the Prince of Wales’ Prince’s Prize.

When planning for his debut disc for Deutsche Grammophon (Mediterraneo), Miloš prepared himself with typical thoroughness. Rather than merely assembling a batch of popular guitar pieces, he devised a theme for the album which reflects his own history and experiences. He is, as he points out, from the Mediterranean region, but for him that doesn’t just mean he should play guitar music from Spain.

“The guitar was brought to Spain by the Moors, and has a huge Arabic influence,” he explains. “My part of the world and the eastern Mediterranean were heavily under the influence of the Ottoman empire for 500 years, so there is a clear connection between the eastern and western Mediterranean. I am exactly in the middle of them, and I want to present that on [the] recording.”

Therefore, the material ranges from Granados, Albeniz and Tarrega (“to represent the Moorish Spain”) to pieces by the Greek composer Theodorakis, some Turkish music, and new arrangements of Montenegrin folk songs. For good measure, “we have a Boccherini fandango which will even use castanets.” Mediterraneo was released in 2011 and topped the charts throughout the year all over the world. Miloš’s recently released his sophomore album Latino, where his inspiration moves from the Mediterranean to the sultry sounds and passion of Latin America.

Summing up his feelings about the future, Miloš says:

“There isn’t a more accessible or more beautiful instrument than the guitar. The guitar repertoire is wonderful and there is a lot of it. It needs to be brought out of its niche and to have a renaissance. This is my mission!”

 

 

source: www.milosguitar.com

 


Miloš Karadaglić plays in recital for the VRS on Sunday, February 17, 2013 at the Vancouver Playhouse at 3:00pm

Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased online or by phone at 604-602-0363


 

Program Notes: A letter from Anthony Roth Costanzo

 

Program Notes: A letter from Anthony Roth Costanzo

As I enter my 20th year of professional performance, I have been reflecting on the most resonant musical moments throughout my development as a singer. From my beginning as a Broadway baby to my now daily dances with Handel, I have realized that there is a lot of music in between those two poles which has shaped me. This program is a collection of personal parcels, each one having a distinct and meaningful place in my trajectory.

As an eager 16 year old planning my first-ever recital, I was immediately taken by the beauty and depth of Henri Duparc’s songs and was simultaneously fascinated by his systematic destruction of his entire oeuvre, apart from a small handful of remaining works. I have chosen to start this recital with the same three songs that began my first recital as a budding countertenor.

Before I could even fathom the idea of vocal recital, at 13, I was asked to do my first role in opera: Miles in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. After years of musical theater, I found the challenge and the emotional complexity of Britten’s work exhilarating. As I entered into Britten’s universe, I discovered classical music’s ability to plumb the depths of human experience with uncanny expression, and it was this discovery that sent me down the road to becoming a classical singer. Britten not only holds a special place in my artistic journey, but also in the history of countertenors as he is the first composer ever to have written an operatic role specifically for countertenor as opposed to castrato — that of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His transcriptions of old English folk songs showcase his agility in wafting between subtly ironic, flat out silly, and poignant.

One thing I’ve learned about being half southern Italian and half Hungarian-Jewish is that while I may know how to eat well, I have a lot of guilt with which to contend. Luckily, both of my parents are psychologists, so I was able to focus mainly on the food. I realized recently that apart from the occasional chicken paprikash, the only connection to my Hungarian heritage I can remember is a miniature bust of Liszt that made its way onto the dresser in my childhood bedroom. When I learned about Liszt’s lore in college, his emotionally virtuosic playing and its palpable effects, I was intrigued. Since then I’ve been trying to put together a group of his songs that felt natural to me as a performer, and it wasn’t until now that I concocted this felicitous combination of his German settings. Connected, but not entirely the same as this Hungarian sense of romanticism, is the characteristically Italian state of impetuosity. Though none of the three Italian arias I am presenting was actually written by an Italian, they were all written for and performed by Italian castrati. These physically altered superstars of their era gave the art of opera wings, and along the way generated a body of work which never ceases to entrance me. Both Mozart and Handel offer endless opportunities to dig into characters with harmonic shifts, textual delineation and of course ornamentation carefully cooked-up by the singers themselves. These three arias represent the foundation of my work as a singer: executing the highest of technical demands while simultaneously rendering emotional arcs tangible.

At six years old I was no good at reading sheet music. My unusually creative piano teacher, Pei-Fen Liu, thought that perhaps instead of trying to play the notes, I’d have an easier time taking my fingers out of the equation. So I began to sing, and though I’m not sure my sight-reading improved, I quickly realized how much I enjoyed singing. After humming notes and singing solfège scales, Pei-Fen decided it was time for the next step. She pulled out a book of Gershwin songs, and away we went. I became so enthusiastic about Gershwin that I used to sit in my room and listen to any recordings I could find. When I discovered Ella Fitzgerald, I wanted so badly to understand how she wove her magic that I remember spending hours trying to copy down each syllable of scat that she added to the tunes she was singing. By the time I was eight, I told my parents that I was ready to give this a go in public. Wonderfully supportive as they were, they helped me to find an audition at a community theater. Filled with anticipation, and a joy of music, I walked into the audition room with a Gershwin tune prepared. Little did I know that I was about to embark upon a life of music and a craft which challenges and moves me every day. As I opened my mouth to sing the first few bars of “Summertime” that day, I couldn’t have imagined that it would close a recital like this one with the VRS.

-Anthony Roth Costanzo

Stephen Says (Wednesday November 21)

Stephen Says: “Insanity and insomnia, the brightness of a nighttime city, the mysticism and the magic.” (Program notes on Stephen’s original composition Piano sonata no. 2 (notturno luminoso), which he will play this Sunday at the Chan Centre.)

Read the Stephen Hough’s full blog for the Telegraph here

 


English pianist Stephen Hough is a true Renaissance man; he is a critically acclaimed musician, composer, journalist, painter and blogger! As we approach Stephen’s November 25th concert at the Chan Centre, join the VRS in our blog series Stephen Says providing you with excerpts and links to Stephen Hough’s blog on The Telegraph.

Stephen Says (Monday November 19)

Stephen Says: Ballet: life and breath and sheer exultation.

Read the Stephen Hough’s full blog for the Telegraph here

 


English pianist Stephen Hough is a true Renaissance man; he is a critically acclaimed musician, composer, journalist, painter and blogger! As we approach Stephen’s November 25th concert at the Chan Centre, join the VRS in our blog series Stephen Says providing you with excerpts and links to Stephen Hough’s blog on The Telegraph.

Stephen Says (Friday November 16)

Stephen Says: “My ear trembles at the sound of a beautiful chord. It’s precisely the bending of meaning and familiarity which excites me – in words and in music.”

Read the Stephen Hough’s full blog for the Telegraph here

 


English pianist Stephen Hough is a true Renaissance man; he is a critically acclaimed musician, composer, journalist, painter and blogger! As we approach Stephen’s November 25th concert at the Chan Centre, join the VRS in our blog series Stephen Says providing you with excerpts and links to Stephen Hough’s blog on The Telegraph.

Program Notes: Stephen Hough

 

PROGRAM NOTES: STEPHEN HOUGH

 

Frédéric Chopin: Nocturnes, Op. 27

The nocturnes are Chopin’s most intimate and personal utterances. Some are wistful, some reflective, some melancholy, some faintly troubled and some serenely joyful. All are sensuously beautiful, suffused with elegance and deeply poetic impulses. During Chopin’s lifetime they were his most popular pieces. Twenty-one survive, the first written when he was seventeen, the last three years before his death. As the title implies, they are suggestive – faintly or strongly as the case may be – of some aspect of dusk, evening, twilight or the dark night and associative emotions.

The two contrasting nocturnes of Op. 27 are enharmonically related (C sharp minor and D flat major). As biographer Jim Samson points out, their accompaniment patterns are wider in range than the composer’s earlier broken-chord patterns. No. 1– dark, troubled and somber – is clearly in ternary form (ABA), with a central episode that speaks of triumph and grandeur only to lapse back to the morose opening material. No. 2 has been called the most voluptuous of the nocturnes. It, too, offers a melody of great beauty, but rather than evoking an aria, it resembles more an operatic duet. More often than not the theme is presented in those parallel thirds or sixths so beloved of the Italian opera composers, and even includes examples of fioriture (decorative filigree).

 

Johannes Brahms: Piano sonata no. 3 in F minor, Op. 5

“Beaten out of steel by cyclopean hands,” “Promethean strength of aspiration,” and “heaven-storming” are just some of the descriptions called forth by the virile outburst that opens Brahms’ longest work for solo piano, composed in 1853 when he was just twenty. Boldness, youthful fire and sonorities of orchestral proportions alternate with intimate meditations, tender dialogues and ardent lyricism in a grand edifice of unassailable musical logic. Brahms proceeds to fashion the sonata-form opening movement with the utmost economy of means, transforming and sculpting the highly malleable initial fragment into an astonishing world of shapes, characters and moods.

Aside from its grandly spacious design, the sonata boasts other special features. Its second movement describes in tone a poetic vision that is inscribed at the top of the page: “The twilight falls, the moonlight gleams, two hearts in love unite, embraced in rapture.” The Scherzo returns us to the bold, assertive world of the first movement. Wide leaps, thundering octaves and the full range of the keyboard give it an exuberant, even epic quality. The Intermezzo represents still another novel element in the sonata. Subtitled Rückblick (backward glance), it serves both as a point of symmetry in the sonata’s overall design and as a programmatic reinterpretation of an earlier movement (the second). The air of heroic struggle resumes in the Finale, which follows without a break. In free rondo form, Brahms takes us on a vast musical journey, incorporating darkly mysterious murmurings, seething turbulence, dramatic outbursts and a chorale-like message of hope, to a triumphant conclusion.

 

Stephen Hough: Piano sonata no. 2

The subtitle for my 2nd Piano sonata, ‘notturno luminoso’, suggests many images: the reflection of the moon on a calm lake perhaps, or stars across a restful sky.  But this piece is about a different kind of night and a different kind of light: the brightness of a brash city in the hours of darkness; the loneliness of pre-morning; sleeplessness and the dull glow of the alarm clock’s unmoving hours; the irrational fears or the disturbing dreams which are only darkened by the harsh glare of a suspended, dusty light bulb.  But also suggested are nighttime’s heightened emotions: its mysticism, its magic, its imaginative possibilities.

The Sonata’s form is ABA and there are three musical ideas: one based on sharps (brightness), one based on flats (darkness), and one based on naturals (white notes) representing a kind of blank irrationality.  The piece opens clangorously, its bold, assertive theme – sharps piled upon sharps – separated by small cadenzas.  Yearning and hesitating to reach a cadence it finally stumbles into the B section where all accidentals are suddenly bleached away in a whiteout.  Extremes of pitch and dynamics splatter sound across the keyboard until an arpeggio figure in the bass gathers rhythmic momentum and leads to the ‘flat’ musical idea, jarring in its romantic juxtaposition to what has gone before.

This whole B section is made up of a collision, a tossing and turning, between the two tonalities of flats and naturals, interrupting each other with impatience until the whiteout material spins up into the stratosphere, a whirlwind in the upper octaves of the piano.  Under this blizzard we hear the theme from the beginning of the piece, firstly in purest, brilliant C major in the treble, then, after it subsides to pianissimo, in a snarl of dissonance in the extreme bass of the instrument.  The music stops … and then, for the first time, we hear the full statement of the ‘flat’ material, Andante Lamentoso.  The music’s sorrow increases with wave after wave of romantic ardour, deliberately risking overkill and discomfort.

At its climax the music halts twice at a precipice then tumbles into the recapitulation, the opening theme now in white-note tonality and unrecognizably spotted across the keyboard.  As this peters out we hear the same theme but now with warm, gentle, romantic harmonies.  A final build-up to an exact repetition of the opening of the piece is blended with material from the B section and, in the last bar, in a final wild scream, we hear all three tonalities together for a blinding second-long flash, brighter than noon, before the final soft chord closes the curtain on these night visions.

– Stephen Hough

Stephen Hough’s Piano sonata No. 2 (notturno luminoso) is a joint commission with funds generously supplied by Lakeside Arts Centre, University of Nottingham; The Schubert Club, St. Paul, Minnesota; Singapore International Piano Festival; Swansea Festival of Music and the Arts; and the Vancouver Recital Society. It was given its premiere by the composer at the Brangwyn Hall, Swansea Festival of Music and the Arts, on October 9, 2012.

 

Robert Schumann: Carnaval, Op. 9

Carnaval consists of 22 musical vignettes, all constructed from three tiny motifs whose notes are derived from the name of a little German town, Asch. (Today it is Aš, just over the border in the Czech Republic, near Bayreuth, Germany). This was where Schumann’s current flame, Ernestine von Fricken, came from. Matters progressed to the point where Schumann and Ernestine became engaged in December of 1834. That month, Schumann began writing the music that he eventually entitled Carnaval.

As any student of music history knows, Schumann jilted Ernestine in favor of Clara Wieck. But for the moment, the 24-year-old composer was infatuated with Ernestine. He discovered that the four letters of Ernestine’s birthplace, Asch, were also in his own name. (In German terms, S=Es (E flat), and H=B natural.) The autobiographical element goes further. Characters from Schumann’s life – both real and imagined – are portrayed, including his wife-to-be Clara (“Chiarina”), Ernestine (“Estrella”), Chopin and Paganini. Then there are the two aspects of Schumann’s musical personality: the quiet dreamer as reflected in Eusebius, and the passionate intensity of Florestan. Figures from the commedia dell’arte of Italian carnivals make appearances: Pierrot, Arlequin, Pantalon and Columbine. Every piece in Carnaval, except the “Préambule”, is based on an ASCH motif, which usually appears at the opening and is then developed in ways both obvious and obscure. However, two years after completing Carnaval, Schumann told his colleague Ignaz Moscheles that he was more interested in the “soul-states” conjured up by the music – the emotions and moods – than in programmatic associations of the movement titles.

 

Program notes for Chopin, Brahms and Schumann by Robert Markow, 2012.

Stephen Says (Wednesday November 14)

Stephen Says: Naked men: what’s the problem? Stephen visits Vienna’s Leopold Gallery and muses, “it’s strange how we create artificial boundaries of tolerance.”

Read the Stephen Hough’s full blog for the Telegraph here

 


English pianist Stephen Hough is a true Renaissance man; he is a critically acclaimed musician, composer, journalist, painter and blogger! As we approach Stephen’s November 25th concert at the Chan Centre, join the VRS in our blog series Stephen Says providing you with excerpts and links to Stephen Hough’s blog on The Telegraph.

Stephen Says (Monday November 12)

Stephen Says: Arresting a Cold: an encounter with honey and the law

Read the Stephen Hough’s full blog for the Telegraph here

 


English pianist Stephen Hough is a true Renaissance man; he is a critically acclaimed musician, composer, journalist, painter and blogger! As we approach Stephen’s November 25th concert at the Chan Centre, join the VRS in our blog series Stephen Says providing you with excerpts and links to Stephen Hough’s blog on The Telegraph.

Stephen Says (Friday November 9)

Stephen Says: Ravel and Debussy are  “completely different animals.”

Read the Stephen Hough’s full blog for the Telegraph here

 


English pianist Stephen Hough is a true Renaissance man; he is a critically acclaimed musician, composer, journalist, painter and blogger! As we approach Stephen’s November 25th concert at the Chan Centre, join the VRS in our blog series Stephen Says providing you with excerpts and links to Stephen Hough’s blog on The Telegraph.

Stephen Says (Wednesday November 7)

Stephen Says: “… the most intricately tricky, frustratingly fiddly, accident-prone little beast I ever wasted hours learning in my youth.”

Read the Stephen Hough’s full blog for the Telegraph here

 


English pianist Stephen Hough is a true Renaissance man; he is a critically acclaimed musician, composer, journalist, painter and blogger! As we approach Stephen’s November 25th concert at the Chan Centre, join the VRS in our blog series Stephen Says providing you with excerpts and links to Stephen Hough’s blog on The Telegraph.

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