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Sunday, April 14, 2002

By Peter B. King, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Most children encounter their parents' doubts whenever they decide to pursue a career in the arts.

Just the opposite, however, occurred for classical guitarist David Russell. His parents are painters, and they told him to go for it.

		David Russell When: 8 p.m. Saturday; preconcert entertainment with Solomon Steelpan Duo at 7:15 p.m. Where: PNC Bank Recital Hall, Duquesne University. Tickets: $20; 412-394-3353 or www.proartstickets.org. David Russell also will teach a master class in the PNC Bank Recital Hall next Sunday. Information: 412-396-5486 or www.gsfapittsburgh.org.

"My parents had given me the feeling that you do whatever you want to do and eke a living out if possible. That's why they were painters -- making a living from it was completely secondary. Quite impractical," he says with his pronounced Scottish trill, then laughs. "Nowadays, people don't think like that."

The "back then" that Russell refers to was in the '60s. Now in his late 40s, he was born in Glasgow. Most summers, the family rode in a van loaded with easels and oils around France for a month or so, to the places where Van Gogh and other post-impressionists his parents admired had painted.

His parents also owned a house on the Spanish island of Minorca, in the Mediterranean. When Russell was 6, the family moved there permanently.

"We had a gallery there -- that's where they sold what they painted. I think they liked the strong light, and the beach is close, and at that time there still were very few tourists. And there's a certain pleasure of living in Spain -- people know how to live well," he says. "To enjoy life."

It was pleasurable enough to persuade the adult Russell to take up residence in Vigo, in the northwest corner of Spain, where he lives with his Spanish-born wife, Maria. From there, he travels around the world giving concerts, a calling that has won him acclaim as an exceptional classical guitarist -- on the short list of the very best. Russell will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday in PNC Bank Recital Hall at Duquesne University, an event presented by the Guitar Society of Fine Art.

Russell came to the guitar through his father -- a "reasonable amateur player," as Russell puts it -- who began teaching him the instrument when he was barely out of the cradle. His dad's heroes were Andres Segovia and the Belgian Gypsy-jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, and their records played constantly around the house.

Russell won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London when he was 16.

After he graduated -- not without doubts as to whether he could survive in music, despite his parents' support -- he did what his folks might have done, traveling with friends in a minibus around England and Spain and attending master classes with guitarists including Jose Tomas, Turibio Santos and John Williams.

He entered, and won, numerous guitar competitions, including the Andres Segovia Competition, the Francisco Tarrega Competition and -- twice -- the Julian Bream prize.

And he began recording, eventually landing a deal with the Cleveland-based Telarc label that has yielded seven CDs so far, from the music of the Paraguayan guitarist-composer Barrios through discs of Torroba, Rodrigo, Giuliani, Celtic folk songs, baroque music, and his latest, "Reflections of Spain."

The new disc includes some of the pieces Segovia made popular. But Russell approaches them in noticeably different ways. The great popularizer of classical guitar in the 20th century imposed his romantic, iconoclastic stamp on everything he touched -- taking liberties with rhythm, in particular.

"Certainly in the time of Segovia, [guitarists] each did so many weird things with the music that they had a lot of personality. Even just in a normal piece, you can't tap your foot to it, because there's just no rhythm. I think if you play a jig, you've got to be able to tap your foot!

"When I was young, I wanted to play like Segovia, and everything I played I did like him. But then each generation has, in some ways, had to break away from their parents."

The generation that came after Segovia, that of John Williams, did just that.

"Certainly when [Williams] was a young man, he played very straight." As a result, Russell's generation "had a model more similar to some of the general musicians, pianists and so on, more like their view of rhythm, at least. But then whether you like someone's expressivity or not, that's another matter. Each person has their own thing."

Among his contemporaries whose "thing" he admires, Russell mentions Manuel Barrueco and the Assad brothers, Sergio and Odair. Among younger players, he singles out a Spaniard named Juan Padilla.

"There's a generation of young guys who are now 25 or 30 who are playing fantastically well. And hopefully they will outdo us, outdo my generation, because the technical ability and technical development and study is really reaching a very high level."

Two of the pieces on "Reflections of Spain" are by Tarrega, the late-19th-century teacher and composer who set the stage for Segovia's emergence. This year is the 150th anniversary of Tarrega's birth, and in recognition of that, Russell's performance at Duquesne will include several Tarrega pieces. Also on the program will be a chaconne by Bach, several pieces by Granados from the new CD and, to start, one of the six "Rossiniana" -- a kind of medley of arias from Rossini operas written by the early 19th-century Italian guitarist-composer Mauro Giuliani.

Listeners familiar with Russell's recordings may hear some differences in the way he plays these pieces live.

"When I play a concert, the thing is to make people enjoy this piece of music, and the excitement of the moment is bigger than the piece itself, shall we say.

"In a performance you can take risks. Maybe you do something that is out of style or a bit weird, and it's better to do that. Whereas if you do certain things a little too off the wall or too unusual on the recording, the first time you hear it you might say, 'Wow that was great.' The third time you might think, 'Uggggh.' You might not want to hear it again. A more -- I wouldn't say correct, but a more purified performance -- is better for the recording, so that you can enjoy it more times."

Russell will perform as a soloist in Pittsburgh, which, apart from his occasional guest shots with orchestras, is how he almost always performs. Does he ever miss making music with others -- chamber music, for example?

"You gain some, you lose some," he says. "And what I lose by not playing with other people very often, I gain in the sense that I have much more freedom to do my own thing. There certainly are times when I feel I miss that sort of contact. But I'm happy to be a soloist, because from a very young age I was a soloist, and that's the way I think. And I'm not very good at making people do what I want, say, as a conductor or be a leader. I prefer to tell myself what to do and then do it the way I want."

Then, of course, playing with other people might mean that the cellist and the violist can't stand each other, or that the violinist gets depressed and misses rehearsal, and so on.

"That's the worst part of all the chamber music ... the social part. I mean, that's also the best part. But we have enough problems with our own families," he says wryly. "It's not necessary to mix it in with work."