Concert: Classical Guitarist Isaac Greene

Guitarist and educator Isaac Greene will present a free concert at CU-Bloomsburg on Wednesday, March 25, at 7 p.m. in Carver Hall, K.S. Gross Auditorium. 

Greene will also give a masterclass for CU-Bloomsburg guitar students on Thursday, March 26, at 5 p.m. in the Haas Center for the Arts, room 166. Both events are free and open to the public and are sponsored by the Commonwealth University Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

A native of Bloomsburg, Greene studied with CU’s guitar professor Matthew Slotkin, earned a Master of Music and a Doctor of Musical Arts in Guitar from the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, and is currently a professor of guitar at Bob Jones University. 

The program will include pieces ranging from the 1500s to the modern era, including pieces composed by Greene himself. 

“Guitarists have five hundred years of lute and guitar repertoire to explore, enjoy, and perform. Maintaining this tradition has two responsibilities: preservation and progress. If we don’t compellingly present the worthy music of the past, it will be lost,’ said Greene. “If we don’t promote new, sometimes uncomfortable, music, then our living tradition becomes a museum that will slowly but surely die. This program is an attempt to do both of those things and show some strains of continuity across five centuries of making music plucking strings.” 

“The first three composers on this program played the lute. Francesco, Dowland, and Weiss were each among the most famous musicians of their day, but with the passing of the lute as a major instrument their music fell into obscurity,” said Greene. “The rest of the works are paired by genre but written at least two hundred years apart. Though of different eras and styles, the starting points of grief, nature, movement, and a formal process show through as these musicians living in different times and places picked up their instruments or sat down at their desks to compose. To these works, and in this venerable tradition, I add two of my own.”

Program

I. Beginnings
Ricercare “La Compagna” (N. 34), Francesco da Milano (1497-1543), trans. Christopher Berg
Praeludium, John Dowland (1562-1626)

II. Memorials
Tombeau “sur la Mort de Mr. Comte d’Logy arrivée 1721,” Silvius Leopold Weiss (1686-1750)
Homenaje “Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy,” Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)

III. Characters
La Rose Op.  46, No. 9, Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829)
Snow on Snow, Ronald Pearl (b. 1954)

IV. Originals
Two Pieces, Isaac Greene
Lost Loss (2023)
Fierce Friend (dearest friend)

V. Dances
The Earl of Essex His Galliard, John Dowland
Felicidade, Antônio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994), Arr. Roland Dyen (1955-2016)

VI. Grounds
Ciaccona, Bryan Johanson (b. 1951)
Passacaglia in D Major, S. L. Weiss

VII. Benediction
Prayer, Frederic Hand (b. 1947)