Tag Archives: Berta Rojas

Changsha Festival 2020

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I’ve been fortunate enough to have been invited 3 years in a row and the dates and registration details for the 2020 festival are here. Owing to the pandemic, some of the festival will be held online.

Mr.Li

There’s also an article below about past festivals by the estimable Steve Mann and links to various performances and media.

Registration start date：Sept. 30, 2020

Preliminary round video submission deadline: Nov. 15, 2020

Notification of finalists : Nov. 30, 2020

Open group final round video submission deadline: Dec. 17, 2020

Youth group final round video submission deadline: Dec. 10, 2020

Children group A & B final round video submission deadline: Dec. 10, 2020

Price of registration is $10. 

More information can be found on the official website: http://guitar.org.cn/ 

Article by Steve Mann

Changsha Guitar Festival: what is it and what does it mean?

At first this seems like an easy question: various guitar competitions with national and international guests giving concerts, lectures and master classes for the duration of about a week in the city of Changsha, southern China.

On a certain level this is true, but the more I think about it the more I realize it is so much more and that it means very different things to different people.

Outside Changsha Music Venue

To start with something that I know a bit about, I can say what the festival means to me. I first went to Changsha in 2015 to help write articles on the event.

I was impressed with the atmosphere, which felt like a cross between a symposium, a set of music concerts, a party and a ‘Chinese style fun for all the family’ competition.

There were many fascinating and well known guests there that year, but I was somewhat in awe of one of them in particular – Roland Dyens.

With Roland being fresh off the plane, and looking quite grumpy, I didn’t quite know how to approach him to ask him questions for the articles I was writing. When I saw him in the breakfast the next day he was working on his laptop and so I sat with some of the other guests. He then came over and showed us what he had been ‘working on’. One of his friends had copied a picture of him having just got off the airplane in Changsha and pasted it next to a scruffy fugitive off some international wanted list! We all laughed hysterically. (In all honesty there was quite a bit of similarity between the two photos). At that point I realized that he was a wonderful talented human being, but with his own unique skills, quirks and charm. In many ways Changsha guitar festival is like this for me; it is a place where these great artists that we hold in high esteem can meet and be part of a grassroots development of the guitar in fun friendly way, with its own unique characteristics.

Roland Dyens giving a master class
Festival organisers and friends

Over the years, I have got to know the organizers, helpers and regular attendees at the festival and I am aware of the massive investment of time, money and energy that goes in to this event.

For them the meaning of the Changsha Guitar Festival is probably something much more personal with the main organizers Mr Li and Xuefei Yang working around the clock to make the festival each year better than the last. The logistics and organizational skills required for arranging such an event are vast, with guests, competitors and sponsors all needing to be taken care of. Both organizers put a lot of skin in the game and they always go the extra mile, with Mr. Li’s team doing anything they can to make people welcome, such as helping one of the international competitors to find an artificial nail at 10 o’clock at night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaaJyc5Hy98

(Xuefei Video: A Moonlit Evening on the Spring River for Classical Guitar and Chinese Flute)

As for the competitors and guests (Gerald has visited three times), they all have their own individual reasons for visiting. Although I do not know these reasons, I see people leaving the festival with faces that show they have had a wonderful time there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmFc7xnT2UE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd6xBhmDxH8

Interview with guests: Johan Smith and Lazhar Cherouana

Regarding the 2020 Changsha Guitar Festival, due to the pandemic situation it will be held later this year with a part held at the Changsha venue and a significant part held online.

The details have finally been fixed but please feel free to check in with the festival website given below.

Vsit here for the official Changsha Guitar Festival Website:

http://guitar.org.cn/

More videos can be found on the official YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC64XKw_Qs_ApWfaCeO8E0cA

Here are some happy moments from past years

Berta Rojas and Xue Fei Yang
Kenneth Kwan, Ben Verdery, Xue Fei, Mark Eden, Ekachai Jearakul
Xue Fei, Paolo Pugliese, Clive Carroll
Damon Smallman and Ingrid Riollot
Raphael Feuillatre and Jihyung Park
The team of helpers
Mr.Li with young players
Cheers!

Triple Fret – Gitara Filipina

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  Beauty. Youth. Talent. Passion Marga Abejo, Iqui Vinculado and Jenny de Vera are Triple Fret, the only all-female classical guitar trio in the Philippines. They have captivated the hearts of music lovers all over with their refreshing brand of music, performance, and love for the classical guitar. Their goal is to transcend barriers of different social class, culture, and religion, to truly bring the joy of music to all. Formally trained in the premiere music schools of the country, Triple Fret stands out with their extensive repertoire of Spanish, Filipino traditional, and well-loved classical pieces, all infused with a style uniquely their own.
Gitara Filipina

So the write up goes, and I have to agree. I was lucky enough to meet and listen to this talented trio in a recent visit to Hong Kong where they were playing at Music City. Their enthusiasm and love of the guitar comes through in their playing and the way they are so open and excited by other performers and teachers. David Russell’s appearance was a source of a flurry of photo snapping! Being of Filipino descent myself I was particularly interested in the way they included Filipino music into their programmes and their wish to make this music more well known around the world with the help of expert arranger, Jeffrey S. Malazo. While I was there, Jenny and Jeffrey were engaged! We had just had an amazing meal in a Japanese restaurant with sashimi, sushi and Korean barbecue (pretty protein rich meal). It was also Jeffrey’s birthday and the enterprising restaurant owners made him a cake consisting of sushi rice and shrimp eggs. Here are some clips of Triple Fret’s concert in Music City, plus a short interview I made with them.

Here is an interview about their debut album “Gitara Filipina”

Here is an interesting article with more music from VerJube Photographics

Berta Rojas with Triple Fret live in Manila and Cebu

The economics of classical music and the Spanish guitar

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From the Philippines (land of my forbears) – plus news about Berta Rojas‘ project there.

The propensity for classical music might be genetic, or the taste might be acquired, or most likely both. What is indisputable is that, on the demand side, the market has been on the decline worldwide for decades, even before the preponderance of digital media and internet piracy and sharing.

If classical music in general is on the wane, the fate of the Spanish or classical guitar suffers a worse fate. The classical guitar has had a long battle to be a solo or even a chamber concert instrument.

In the Philippines, there was a major effort to promote classical guitar music since the early 2000s by visionaries Tonyboy Cojuangco and Greg Yu.

Read more

More on the guitar in the Philippines

Selected Filipino Guitar music posted by Raffy Lata

Some samples of Harana (courtship songs) arranged for guitar

The world sends us garbage… We send back music – the children of Cateura and their “Garbage Instruments” – Los Reciclados

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Mozart played on oil drums!

Just outside the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion sits Cateura, a massive landfill that receives 1,500 tons of new rubbish each day. The dumping site’s surrounding neighborhoods are home to several thousand families who make a living by sorting through its rotting waste, and separate out whatever can be sold to the local recycling industry. According to UNICEF, Cateura is a community marked by extreme poverty, illiteracy, and pollution.

It’s also home to an orchestra—one made up of local children whose instruments are made entirely from recycled garbage.

This is an article in TakePart amplifying my earlier post on Cateura’s collaboration with Berta Rojas.

It’s an intriguing story of a musician, Favio Chávez, who got together with a rubbish collector, Nicolás Gómez, to make instruments together using packing cases, oil drums and old bottles.

“If you paint your village, you paint the whole world”

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imageBerta Rojas‘ new album “Salsa Roja” was released last month, paying tribute to her beloved Latin America. But what makes this collection of music extra special is the collaboration with the Recycled Instruments Orchestra of Cateura — or Landfill Harmonic Orchestra — a 19-member ensemble comprised of children from Asunción, Paraguay who perform using instruments they have built from recycled trash. Berta is also working to design what she hopes will be the Cateura Music School, the town’s very first music school with real instruments.

In case you didn’t catch it, this heartwarming video is a backstage look at the project she was involved in, in her native Paraguay, with composer and conductor Edín Solís and the children of Loma San Jerónimo. Continue reading →