William Kanengiser, classical guitar

Guitar Nights Celebrates USC Classical Guitar!

William Kanengiser, LAGQ member, USC Thornton Professor and acclaimed soloist, will perform  along with some of his most talented students.  The lineup will include:

Senior Robert Wang, the current “GSI Scholar” at USC, will play Spanish dances on Baroque guitar, as well as works by Richard Wagner and George Crumb on modern classical guitar.

Doctoral students and Thornton Teaching Assistants Grigorii Koval and Joseph Douglass will perform as a duo, featuring selections from Tedesco’s Sonata Canonica and Giuliani’s brilliant Variaciones Concertantes.

Featured artist William Kanengiser will take the stage and play works by Joaquín Turina, Leo Brouwer, Dušan Bogdanović and Bryan Johanson.  He’ll also perform the West Coast premiere of “Reflections on the Dranyen” by Andrea Clearfield.  Commissioned as part of his “Diaspora Project”, the work is based on traditional Tibetan music, and was chosen as the set piece for this year’s GFA Competition.

As a special treat, the concert will conclude with a performance by Marianchi Los Troyanos de USC, a group of USC students playing and singing traditional Mexican songs on folkloric instruments.

Recognized as one of America’s finest classical guitarists, William Kanengiser won First Prize in the 1987 Concert Artists Guild International Competition as well as major guitar competitions in Toronto (1981) and Paris (1983).  He has recorded four solo CD’s for the GSP label, ranging from classical to jazz to Caribbean to Near Eastern styles, and he recently recorded two CD’s for the Suzuki Guitar Advanced Repertoire Series. In 2005 he released a live concert DVD, “Classical Guitar and Beyond”, for Mel Bay Recordings, which also features Mr. Kanengiser’s talents as a comedian/mimic in his infamous “GFA Imitation Show”. A member of the guitar faculty at the USC Thornton School of Music since 1983, he was a recipient of the “2011 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching”. He has given master classes around the world and produced two instructional videos, “Effortless Classical Guitar” and “Classical Guitar Mastery” for Hot Licks Video. The 2010-11 season was marked by special performances of Shingo Fujii’s “Concerto de Los Angeles” for solo guitar and guitar orchestra, which was written for Mr. Kanengiser and recorded in Kyoto in 2008. This piece was played with guitar students in seven US cities, as well as in Osaka and Shanghai. Featured recitals in 2012-13 include Spivey Hall near Atlanta and appearances with the Long Island, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Calgary and Indianapolis Guitar Socities.