Presenters' Concert June 6th!

On June 6, at the Harmony House in Webster, the Rochester Guitar Club presents its first concert. Four of our earliest club presenters: Deb Fox, Jerry Preston, Mir Ali and Petar Kodzas, will be giving us another chance to hear them play live.

Each will be playing a short set of music and the styles will run a wide swath for anyone’s money: Elizabethan music, Renaissance music, New Age, Classical, Folk, Flamenco and Indian Ragas. Its instrumentation will include classical guitar, steel string guitar, lute, theorbo, and sitar!

Admission is $15, $12 for students. With each ticket, you’ll be entered in our raffle to win one of a couple Rochester Jazz Festival Club Passes we are giving away. Additional raffle tickets may be purchased ($5) at the concert and our May 11 meeting.

Deb Fox

Deborah Fox presented early stringed instruments to the club in January ‘07. For our concert she will bring her lute, and the striking theorobo, a lute-like instrument with a very long neck to accommodate several bass strings.

A cum laude graduate of Smith College, Fox began her musical career as a classical guitarist performing with the Orpharion Duo, and was twice named a Young Artist of the Year by Musical America. Now a lutenist with a span of repertoire ranging from medieval to baroque music, she has performed at the Carmel Bach Festival; with the New York Collegium under conductors Fabio Biondi and Andrew Parrot; Concert Royal; Brandywine Baroque; Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society; Rochester’s Publick Musick; the Toronto Consort, Aradia, Tafelmusik, Arion Ensemble, and Les Violons du Roy all in Canada; and the Orquestra Barroca Catalana (Barcelona, Spain). You can learn more about her perfomances at the site for Pegasus Early Music, pegasusearlymusic.org

Jerry Preston

Jerry Preston visited us in February ‘07, and talked about two-handed tapping and his guitar style. With the use of harmonics, two handed chordal tapping, altered tunings, and a combination of strumming, slapping, and other percussive techniques, his guitar evolves into an orchestra of melody, harmony, and rhythm.

In 2002, Preston and bassist Chuck Bianchi released their first CD together. Dreaming Out Loud serves as a condensed culmination to a decade of exploration. Meeting with critical acclaim, Dreaming Out Loud is a graceful compilation of bass solos, guitar pieces and duets. Music from the disc has been featured on radio programs such as Music of the 21st Century and the nationally syndicated Echoes with John Diliberto.

Petar Kodzas

Petar Kodzas(petarkodzas.com) has performed throughout Europe and the eastern United States, with recitals for concert series, chamber music recitals, guitar societies and colleges. His activities include presentations, master-classes and lectures for Jeunesses Musicales, American String Teachers Association, and College Music Society. Most recently he participated at the international guitar festivals in Belgrade, Alexandria, Ithaca, and Rochester as a performer, teacher and adjudicator. He met with the club in May ‘07.

Of his new CD, Between Worlds, Kodzas says “Every page of music we play becomes a piece of personal and intimate history. These pages we keep over time, as we travel and perform, become almost autobiographical, displaying comments written down from other guitarists, coffee stains from some festival, secret messages from my wife, my daughter’s artistic miniatures and my own personal remarks.

“Each of the works that I chose for this recording of classics inspired by folk music, have been with me for some time. They show a history of my thoughts and travels in the margins alongside the musical notes of my favorite composers.”

Mir Ali

Mir Ali (www.mir-ali.com) gave a presentation about Flamenco guitar in November ‘07. He’s been described by Acoustic Guitar Magazine as “an exceptional nylon string guitarist” and by NPR as “mesmerizing and hypnotic” Since winning his first guitar competition at the age of thirteen, Mir has been raising eyebrows of audiences and music critics around the globe with unique, expressive and dazzling performances.

A much in-demand soloist, chamber and studio musician and guitar pedagogue, Mir’s performances and master classes have taken him to three continents and have been greeted with standing ovations and critical acclaim. He has performed across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. In the past two seasons, he has toured Spain, Italy, Canada, and has performed at New York’s Shea Stadium before a crowd of over 5,000 people. His appearance with the Irish Classical Theater Company in the production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” awarded him outstanding reviews. Buffalo News referred to his performance as “...stunningly perfect...”

You can learn more about Mir on his website,

It promises to be a far-reaching night as four masters of very diverse styles converge on one room.

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