{"id":5698,"date":"2016-12-14T15:59:35","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T23:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=5698"},"modified":"2021-06-10T08:27:51","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:27:51","slug":"anabel-montesinos-takes-the-spirit-of-catalonia-everywhere-she-goes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/anabel-montesinos-takes-the-spirit-of-catalonia-everywhere-she-goes\/","title":{"rendered":"Anabel Montesinos Takes the Spirit of Catalonia Everywhere She Goes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/store.elizabethl27.sg-host.com\/collections\/featured-products\/products\/no-384-winter-2016\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">From the Winter 2016 issue of <em>Classical Guitar<\/em><\/a> | BY MARK SMALL<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p>Watching Spanish-born Anabel Montesinos in concert is a perfect demonstration of highly burnished technique employed completely in the service of the music. During her June recital at Boston GuitarFest 2016 (the 11th annual festival under Eliot Fisk\u2019s artistic direction), Montesinos opened impressively with Mauro Giuliani\u2019s <em>Grand Overture Op. 61<\/em>. She plumbed the dramatic depths of the eight-plus-minute work and ripped through the various arpeggio sections with vigor. She later provided an elegant rendition of Enrique Granados\u2019 <em>Valses Po\u00e9ticos<\/em> that was striking for her unhurried, lyrical phrasing, timbral colorations, and crisp scale work. Montesinos quickly won the crowd over. Her program also offered authoritative takes on music by her countrymen Francisco T\u00e1rrega, Fernando Sor, and Isaac Alb\u00e9niz. The festival\u2019s theme being <em>Viva Espa\u00f1a!<\/em>, Montesinos added even more authenticity to her concert by wearing a beautiful black <em>traje de flamenca<\/em> flared at the knees and trimmed with bright red ruffles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Anabel Montesinos  -Zapateado\" width=\"1170\" height=\"878\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1GjcMQkm9q8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Montesinos grew up in Hospitalet del Infant, a coastal village in the Tarragona region of Catalonia, Spain. When she was only five, her mother noted her interest in music. \u201cI loved classical music very much\u2014violin and orchestral music\u2014so my mother took me to a local music school,\u201d Montesinos says. \u201cI wanted to start playing violin, but my mother\u2019s family came from Sevilla, where everyone loves flamenco and people in every family play the guitar. My mother asked me, \u2018Why not begin with guitar?\u2019 All of my uncles played. So I started playing the guitar.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Montesinos was blessed with insightful teachers who helped her build a solid technical foundation. \u201cThey taught me very well,\u201d she recalls. \u201cBy the time I was six or seven, I was playing in public for school concerts. One summer, Vania del Monaco came to teach at the school and wanted me to be her private student. She saw that I could do more than the others at my level.\u201d Montesinos ended up studying with del Monaco for seven years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At 12, Montesinos presented her first solo recital and started gaining attention as a guitar<em> wunderkind<\/em>. Renowned Spanish composer Ant\u00f3n Garc\u00eda Abril, hearing her play when she was 15, called her \u201ca promising star of the classical guitar.\u201d His assessment was borne out when, at 17, she became the youngest person to win the national Francisco T\u00e1rrega competition in Castel\u00f3n, Spain. Other competitions followed, with Montesinos taking first prize in nine European contests in Poland, Italy, Austria, France, and Spain. A contract to record her debut album for the Naxos Laureate Series followed on the heels of her 2002 win at the prestigious International Francisco T\u00e1rrega Competition in Benic\u00e0ssim, Spain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During the Boston concert, Montesinos showed her flair for Spanish music, but she maintains a stylistically diverse repertoire. \u201cI play everything,\u201d she told me. \u201cI like Romantic and Spanish music very much. I\u2019ve investigated Spanish music from different eras, and my first CD has a lot of Romantic music. But I also play Bach and contemporary music\u2014all the styles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In addition to her solo recitals, Montesinos has played concertos with orchestras as a solo artist and as a duo with her husband, Marco Tamayo, another outstanding virtuoso. The two met at the T\u00e1rrega Competition in Benic\u00e0ssim in 2001. Fascinated by his teaching, she became his student at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, Austria, in 2003. They later married and now make their home in Austria and work together frequently. \u201cIt\u2019s great when we get an offer to play as a duo because we can travel together,\u201d Montesinos says. \u201cThat\u2019s much more fun than traveling alone. In our duo concerts, sometimes we will each play some solos. It\u2019s more interesting for the people if we start as a duo, then I play some solos, Marco plays solos, and then we finish as a duo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As an ensemble, they cover a lot of geographic and stylistic territory. Among their many videos on YouTube, they can be seen at various locales playing Scarlatti sonatas, two-guitar settings of Beatles tunes, or <em>Concierto Madrigal<\/em>, Joaqu\u00edn&nbsp;Rodrigo\u2019s formidable work for two guitars and orchestra. At the other end of the spectrum is their playful single-guitar-four-hands rendition of Mozart\u2019s \u201cRondo alla Turca.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Anabel Montesinos &amp; Marco Tamayo - Paganini\/Beatles Medley\" width=\"1170\" height=\"878\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/V15yiCaOY_8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Asked how she approaches learning new music, Montesinos says, \u201cAt the beginning, I like to play through once to get a general impression of the character of the piece. Then I take small passages that need work and try to develop good reflexes and learn them well. After that, I work on bigger phrases and then put larger sections together. Once I have the right fingerings and movements down, it gives me the security to play through the entire piece. If you always play through the whole piece all the time when you still have problems with some passages, you will just be repeating the same mistakes. That makes it more difficult to play the piece correctly than if you had worked on the problems from the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Montesinos and Tamayo both play guitars built by Australian luthier Simon Marty with a scale length of 650mm, and strung with Savarez Alliance Blue strings. \u201cMine has a spruce top and Marco\u2019s has a cedar top,\u201d she says. \u201cFor the duo, they have different sounds, but go together very nicely. I feel that spruce best suits my playing.\u201d Montesinos did not bring her Simon Marty to Boston, and borrowed an instrument built by Massachusetts luthier Stephan Connor. Its European spruce top, rosewood back and sides, and Connor\u2019s trademark interlocking fan bracing system provided a traditional tone quality and a powerful sound in Montesinos\u2019 hands. She praised the guitar from the stage. (Connor relates that Montesinos and Tamayo have since ordered spruce and cedar models.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Montesinos has released two solo albums, and Tamayo three, for Naxos, but they will release their <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.marcotamayoedition.com\/\">forthcoming duo album independently through their website<\/a><\/strong>, where Tamayo\u2019s pedagogical materials are also available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Montesinos is among a growing number of highly accomplished women pursuing careers as concert guitarists. Using Spain as her reference point, she credits societal evolution for the appearance of more female performers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe mentality was different in the past,\u201d she says. \u201cIn Spain, the woman was at home with the kids and the man was working. Women couldn\u2019t work. Maybe that is why there were more men than women in the field. Everything is more free now.\u201d\b<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This article originally appeared in the <a href=\"https:\/\/store.elizabethl27.sg-host.com\/collections\/digital-archives\/products\/digital-archive-2009-2019\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Winter 2016 issue<\/a> of <\/em>Classical Guitar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/store.elizabethl27.sg-host.com\/collections\/featured-products\/products\/no-384-winter-2016\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0632\/7849\/products\/CG_384_1024x1024.jpg?w=1170\" alt=\"\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At 17, she became the youngest person to win the national Francisco T\u00e1rrega competition in Castel\u00f3n, Spain. Today, she maintains a stylistically diverse repertoire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"At 17, she became the youngest person to win the national Francisco T\u00e1rrega competition in Castel\u00f3n, Spain. Today, she maintains a stylistically diverse repertoire.","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Anabel-Montesinos-Classical-Guitar-Magazine.jpg?fit=2292%2C1222&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16342,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698\/revisions\/16342"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}