Because I generally had no pressing need to obtain interviews by a certain deadline, it was sometimes months or even years between the initial contact and the time when we sat down together for the conversation.  This chat with guitarist David Russell was one of these which had been pushed back a few times until a suitable space was available.

We were finally able to get together in June of 1996, and it certainly was worth the wait.  Russell was cheery and amicable, and seemed to enjoy speaking about his instrument and its world. 

Here is what was said on that nice warm afternoon . . . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:    Nice to finally get together after all this time.  We’ve been trying to meet two or three times when you have been in Chicago.

David Russell:    Yeah.  It’s always been kind of short visits.

BD:    Do you like short visits, or would you rather have longer visits?

DR:    I would rather have longer visits when my wife is with me.  When I’m on my own, short is fine because I don’t get enough time at home, and it’s always nice to come back.  But this is the first time I’ve ever been here in the summer.  I’ve always been here when it’s so cold, and Chicago is pretty windy and cold in the winter.  So it is great; a lovely day today.

BD:    Does the weather affect the instrument, or does it just affect you?

DR:    Actually, it does affect the instrument because here in the rooms it gets so dry.  I find I have to turn on the showers and put wet towels around because the guitar dries up too much.  It doesn’t sound so good, basically.

BD:    Does it get too soggy in the summertime?

DR:    No.  This is great!  The instrument sounds great just now because this is ideal weather, really.  Also, your fingers go better.

BD:    So how does a Scotsman wind up being a world-famous guitar player?

DR:    [Laughs]  Mostly because my father plays the guitar.  He’s an amateur and doesn’t play very well, but he started me.  Really, I just started when I was a little kid, and then we all moved to Spain when I was about six.  It’s not that everybody in Spain plays the guitar, like the popular image, but certainly a lot of kids learn to play.  It’s quite normal for kids to play in little groups and little bands, and accompany songs, and so on.

BD:    Did you go to Spain for the guitar, or did the family just happen to go there?

DR:    We went there because my parents are artists.  They’re both painters.  They had been to the south of France a few times, and we ended up going to Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands, mostly because for landscape painters, places with a lot of light and long summers are exciting for them.  Scotland is a great place, but really, the weather does get you down at times, especially if you spend a couple of years in the Mediterranean.  You get really spoiled.  I love going back to Scotland, but it’s pretty rough.

BD:    Is there any Scottish guitar music?

DR:    There is, actually.  There are a few contemporary composers from Scotland that are very good; McGuire is one who comes to mind.  In Scotland there are maybe only four or five million people, but there are quite a few good young guitarists there.  There’s the Scottish Academy of Music that has very good general music all around, and they have a good guitar department.  In the in-between period

BD:    How do you divide your career between the solo concerts and the concerto performances?

DR:    Just as it comes.  Concerto performing for guitar is always a small proportion of the concerts.  I’ll probably play five or six across the summer, and maybe fifteen solo concerts.  That’s about the proportion, and this year it’s maybe a little more than some other years.  Basically it’s just as it fits in.  I don’t necessarily go out of my way to look for concertos.  Playing concertos is great fun for us because it’s different and we don’t do it very often.  Also, we get a chance to play for a different audience.  It’s not the same audience that goes to a solo concert, so it’s fun and I enjoy it.  We do have a slight problem because the classical guitar is a very quiet instrument, and we usually have to amplify.  Nowadays, the amplification is getting better and better.  The systems are better.

BD:    So it doesn’t sound like it’s amplified?

DR:    If it’s done well, it should sound good enough.  If you think, for example, when you listen to a CD, that’s actually gone through a whole lot of mechanical things, and basically it’s amplified.  Yet it can sound beautiful if it’s done properly.  I think a normal, amplified concert

ut I’m not really too sure how it’s going to sound with baroque music because it lacks a certain tinkly effect that you can do with the Gilbert guitar.  That one sounds really nice in baroque music.  Maybe it’s one step closer to the harpsichord, shall we say, and this is more like a grand piano sound.  I have to kind of bend this one a little bit.  I can make the tinklier sound, but it’s not natural for this guitar, whereas with the Gilbert, if I was playing Spanish music, I had to kind of bend it ’round to try and make it more gloopy, to make it sound dark and warm with big vibrato.  It was quite hard on the Gilbert.  It was always an effort.  I also have another American guitar by a guy called Greg Byers that I’ve used most of this year, and it sounds great with the Spanish music.

BD:    So it’s the kind of music that goes with that guitar.  Does that influence your selection of programming?

DR:    It will.  If I use this one this year, it’s definitely going to make me play some of the more romantic music that I’ve had to set aside a little bit recently.  But then I’m going to experiment with the program I’m using this summer, and I won’t change my program just for the guitar yet.  This really is an experiment.  But this guitar sounds great for Rodrigo.  It sounds good when you play it with a pretty thick sound, and a sort of macho sound.

BD:    There’s a lot of solo music for the guitar, but are there enough concertos?

DR:    No, there are not, really.  I would love to have another 10 concerti that are really good and worth playing.  There are a few composers who have written some very good concerti recently, and the one that comes to mind is by Leo Brouwer, a Cuban composer who is now working as a conductor in Cordoba, Spain.  Brouwer has written three or four concerti.  There are two of them I really like and that I think are excellent.  They’ve made the guitar sound good; the orchestra sounds good, and all around it’s exciting to play.  There are quite a few pretty contemporary pieces, but we only get a chance to play a few; Stephen Dodgson wrote a few concerti, and Lennox Berkeley, and a few of the English composers.  I’m sure in America there are many that I wouldn’t know of.  The problem is that we may only get one booking in a year, or one booking in five years, for some of these concerti.  They’re very difficult and take a lot of time to learn, so it’d be unusual for me to actually learn one simply on the off chance that one day I might get booked.  But when I’m offered, I pick.  Usually they say, “Can you play the Rodrigo concerto for us?”  I say okay, I’ll be there.  When they say to me, “Take your choice,” next time I’ll probably try and play one of the other Brouwer ones that I haven’t done, or one of the concerti that are lesser known.  As far as the solo repertoire, there’s more than I’m ever going to be able to learn in my years of life and playing.

BD:    So how do you decide which ones you will play and which ones you will let go?

DR:    It’s nice to play things that other people don’t play, and sometimes it’s nice to take a risk and play something that may not sound great; something you maybe put a lot of effort into, and then play it twice and put it away.  But still, I like doing that, and I like to have at least 90 percent of my program each year be new stuff for me.  Hopefully about half of that is not very well known, or completely unknown.  This is not necessarily all by modern composers.  Sometimes it will be stuff from the last century because there’s still a lot to be played — sometimes by well-known composers like Fernando Sor and Giuliani.  People tend to play the four famous pieces by Sor, whereas there are another twenty that are good.  Actually he’s got a pile of music this high [puts his hand above his head].  He wrote hours and hours of music.  A lot of it you won’t necessarily want to play because maybe it’s written for amateur players of his period, but a lot of it is pretty good.  We get stuck with the ones that Segovia made famous.

BD:    What is it that makes them good?

DR:    I don’t know.  It’s a whole mixture of things; sometimes a lack of flaws or a lack of boring parts.  There was a period where musicians like Julian Bream would take the scissors to them and just cut out bits that he didn’t like.  [Both laugh]  Nowadays, unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — we can’t really do that.  I sometimes really feel like doing it, but I don’t think it’s fair.  It’s easier just to put up with the slightly weaker parts of the composition.  The best pieces don’t have weak parts.  Sometimes pieces become good simply because they’re played well by some very famous people, and so people accept that this is a good piece.

BD:    So they’re played better than they are?

DR:    At least all that’s good there is brought out, especially if the younger players have a really good model.  Let’s take Segovia, who in many ways did a lot of the groundwork for the rest of us to start playing concerts.  He would take something

BD:    Is there a huge difference between music that was originally written for the guitar, and transcriptions that are made for the guitar of music written for other instruments?

DR:    Yeah there is, in a sense that up until this century, most of the guitar music was written by guitarists and most of lute music was written by lutenists, with a few exceptions, of course.  Most people who play the instrument are caught, in that they will only write what they can play because most of them are writing it for themselves.  So unless they were really agile players, I mean technically, they wouldn’t necessarily demand enough out of their instrument.  And a lot of them would often get caught into a little thing of writing tricks.  There are certain little finger patterns that actually sound great, but we all know it’s really easy.  So these little idioms start to creep in.  Of course that happens in all instruments, and it’s normal that that’s going to happen.  But most of that music is actually designed to make the guitar sound good, and maybe to let the guitarist show off a certain amount.  A lot of it has more of the virtuoso quality — like Paganini violin music.  Well, Paganini also wrote guitar music — not to such a high level, because he wasn’t as good a guitarist — but in the similar vein.  Giuliani was another composer of that period who wrote, basically, to show off what he could do.  Sor was slightly different in that he was a more developed musician, and maybe not quite such an agile player.  So he got more out of the instrument, musically, by use of harmony, than just purely showing how fast his fingers would go.  Perhaps at the beginning of the century or end of last century, it was easier to do a transcription because the transcriber would take complete liberty of the piece.  He would actually rewrite bits and expand bits to make them sound more interesting, and just reduce other bits to give a general view of this section of whatever.  They usually called it “Fantasies on,” rather than a transcription exactly.  Nowadays when we do transcriptions, because of the tradition or because of whatever way it’s developed, we try to play as close as the original would have been.

BD:    That sounds like it puts you in a straightjacket.

DR:    A little bit, yeah.  Some pieces sound great, pieces like Albeniz’s Grenada.  Sometimes it’s great to play as many of the notes as he wrote on the piano.  Obviously we have to reduce some because we simply don’t have enough strings, but some of those pieces do sound great on our instrument.  However, I still think that some of the best transcriptions are actually the ones where the transcribers have freed themselves of the traditions, and just made it sound good on the instrument.  You do the basic work and then say, “It just sounds better if you reduce it,” or you make the melody come out better by taking away some of the other stuff.  But if I am adroit enough with my fingers, I should be able to get all those extra notes and also make the melody come out well.  Transcribing and playing transcribed music has made the guitar players reach a better level of playing, really, because we’ve had to be technically more advanced than, say, if we were only playing Sor and Giuliani.  Also I would say we are musically more advanced, because if I had to play only Sor and Giuliani and only guitar music for the rest of my life, I would sorely miss playing Bach Chaconnes.  I don’t want to go through life without ever playing those pieces.  I may never play any Beethoven on my guitar, but I’m certainly going be playing some of the other well-known composers and great composers.

BD:    Have you thought of maybe transcribing some of the bagatelles from Beethoven for guitar?

DR:    Actually, some people have done it, and the problem is that a lot of the stuff — the music by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, etcetera — that would be accessible to us tends to be very well known because it’s accessible to many amateur pianists.  And many people who study a bit of music have had a go at those pieces, so it doesn’t really sound great.  It’s better to transcribe an unknown piece because then people don’t have a prejudice about how it should sound and they don’t have a model of Pollini playing it.  [See my Interview with Maurizio Pollini.]  So we actually are freer to do our own thing, and that’s why something Albeniz’s Grenada also being Spanish helps.  There are not that many very famous people — apart from Alicia de Larroccha — that have made these great performances of it, and not that many amateur pianists sit down and play Granada on the piano.  They’ll sit down and play one of the bagatelles, or a nocturne by Chopin, and some of these pieces do transcribe onto the guitar quite well, and work very beautifully.

BD:    We’re kind of dancing around it, so let me get the question straight off

BD:    Do you play the same for the microphone as you do for the live audience?

DR:    There’s a certain difference.  I try really hard to make the recording sound as exciting as I hope it will in a concert.  But certainly there are certain differences.  The perfection now required in recording has reached such a high level, and the guitar is a very noisy instrument.  We play at a low decibel level, so our finger noise is pretty close to our music noise

BD:    Are you at the point in your career that you want to be now?

DR:    In many senses, yes, I suppose.  We all aspire to more in some things, but I have to be happy because I’ve dedicated a lot of time to the guitar, and I would say about ninety-nine percent of my friends I’ve made through the guitar.  I live for playing concerts, which is the dream that I had when I was a kid.  I travel the world.  I wanted to be a botanist to get to all these weird places.  I get to go to them, playing guitar, so I really can’t complain.  There’s maybe one or two steps that I wanted to do that are beginning to sort out now, and one of them is I didn’t have a particularly good record contract.  Now I’m with Telarc and it’s going very well.  In the last couple of years I’ve sorted out quite a few things.  Of course, everything can get better.  Maybe next year’ll be better.

BD:    Do you have any advice for younger guitarists coming along?

DR:    I would say whether you’re an amateur guitarist or an aspiring professional or an active professional, one of the most important things is never lose your enthusiasm.  What started each one of us was the enthusiasm for the instrument.  Sometimes when the younger guitarists start in a career or they finish their few years at university, that really cuts out their enthusiasm, especially when it’s really hard to find concerts.  It’s really hard to mostly play not because you want a career, but because you really like to play.  Keep that in mind, and keep learning new material just for yourself, and play it as well as you can.  When you play a concert, you’ve got to play well.  I say that to every one of them who are aspiring professionals and to beginning professionals because, as I said, every good concert is good for all of us, and every bad one is bad for all of us.  If we’re always prepared, then it should be good enough.

BD:    Do you have any advice for someone who wants to write music for the guitar?

DR:    The advice is actually not to get trapped by knowing too much about the instrument.  It’s better to let the guitarist tell you, after you’ve written, “Look, I can’t do this; I can’t do that.  This is not sounding good; that’s not sounding.”  Experiment!

BD:    In other words, just write their music?

DR:    Yeah.  Don’t get trapped.  One of the most horrible sounds for me is the sound of open strings — bang, bang, bing, bing

David Russell Born: 1953 - Glasgow, Scotland, UK The Scottish guitarist, David Russell, was born in Glasgow, and while still very young (age 5), moved with his parents to Menorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean. His father, an artist, was an avid amateur guitarist. It became natural for David to pick up the instrument, and his father began to teach him to play it. He cannot remember when he did not play the guitar. Before he could read music, he could play the pieces by ear that he had learned from listening to Andrés Segovia recordings. When he got somewhat older he also learned to play violin and French horn. David Russell returned to Britain at the age of 16 to attend the Royal Academy of Music in London. There his primary teacher was Hector Quine. He also continued to study horn and violin. While studying, he twice won the Julian Bream Prize in guitar. He graduated in 1974 with a Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust Scholarship. In 1975, the Spanish Government granted him a special grant to enable him to return to Spain and continue his studies with José Tomás in Santiago de Compostela. In the next few years, he won the major Spanish guitar prizes - the José Ramírez Competition of Santiago de Compostela in 1975, the Andrés Segovia Prize of Palma de Mallorca in 1977, the Alicante Prize, and the most prestigious of all, Spain's Francisco Tárrega Competition. David Russell made his Wigmore Hall (London) and New York debuts in the same year, 1981, and has since performed and recorded widely in concerts, recitals and music festivals. He has performed in the major concert venues of the world in North (New York, Los Angeles, Toronto) and South America, Asia (Tokyo), Australia, and Europe (London, Madrid, Rome). David Russell is an exceptional classical guitarist, known for an attractive and outgoing stage presence. He is world renowned for his superb musicianship and inspired artistry, which have earned the highest praise from audiences and critics alike. He is noted for including new or unfamiliar music in most of his recitals. An often-mentioned attribute of his playing is his command over a wide variety of tone colour. His love of his craft resonates through his flawless and seemingly effortless performance. The attention to detail and provocative lyrical phrasing suggest an innate understanding of what each individual composer was working to achieve, bringing to each piece a sense of adventure. Composers who have written music for him include Jorge Morel, Francis Kleynijans, Carlo Domeniconi, Sergio Assad, and Guido Santorsola. His qualities carrie over into his frequent stints as a teacher of master-classes, for which he is much in demand. David Russell has recorded primarily for the GHA and Telarc Records labels, and on Opera Tres, he recorded the complete works of Francisco Tarrega. Since 1995 he has an exclusive recording contract with Telarc International, with whom he has recorded 12 CD's up to now, among them Aire Latino, which received a grammy in 2005. He has made recordings of several works of the Paraguayan composer Agustín Barrios Mangoré and Spanish composer Federico Moreno-Torroba and a release comprising the three solo guitar concerted works of Joaquín Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuéz, Fantasía para un Gentilhombre, and Concierto para una Fiesta. In recognition of his great talent and his international career, David Russell was named a Fellow of The Royal Academy of Music in London in 1997. In May 2003 he was bestowed the great honor of being made "adopted son" of Es Migjorn, the town in Minorca where he grew up. Later the town named a street after him, "Avinguda David Russell". In November 2003 he was given the Medal of Honor of the Conservatory of the Balearics. In 2005 he was GRAMMY award winner for his CD Aire Latino, in the category of best instrumental soloist in classical music. After winning the grammy award, the town of Nigrán in Spain where he resides, gave him the silver medal of the town in an emotional ceremony. In May 2005 he received an homage from the music conservatory of Vigo, culminating with the opening of the new Auditorium, to which they gave the name "Auditorio David Russell".

This interview was recorded at his hotel on June 20, 1996.  It was used (along with recordings) on WNIB in 1998, and on WNUR in 2006.  It was transcribed and posted on this website in 2012.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. 

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.