Bringing WA landscapes to life with Perth Guitar Quartet

Perth Guitar Quartet are gearing up for a CD-launch concert featuring the world-premiere of newly commissioned works for classical guitar inspired by the WA landscape. It’s just one of many highlights that make up the Perth International Classical Guitar Festival, going down at the UWA Conservatorium of Music from Friday, July 28 to Sunday, July 30. The piece, titled West Australian Landscapes, adds to a growing list of innovative performance projects for the group, which is comprised of four of WA’s most accomplished guitarists – Dr Jonathan Fitzgerald, Don Candy, Dr Melissa Fitzgerald, and Jameson Feakes. BRAYDEN EDWARDS spoke to Dr Jonathon Fitzgerald to find out more about the festival, the premiere performance, and classical guitar.

Congrats on bringing this new work West Australian Landscapes to the stage this month. How long has this been in the works for and how will it feel to be performing it live for the first time?

It’s been quite a journey! Planning for the project began early in 2022, and really ramped up over the last six months with many hours of rehearsals and recording sessions. We’re so excited to finally perform these works – the composers have written such fantastic music for us, and we can’t wait to share it.

What was the process behind selecting and composing these works?

The Australian classical guitar repertoire is heavily influenced by nature and landscape. Most of the existing works, however, are inspired by locations in the eastern states. We really wanted to help shift the balance by putting together a concert program (and CD) entirely of new works which draw their inspiration from WA. We commissioned three composers, gave them total artistic freedom, and ended up with really diverse works inspired by the Leaning Trees of Greenough, the Swan River, and native West Australian bird life. We’ll be premiering these alongside a work we commissioned back in 2016 inspired by the historic East Perth Cemeteries.

This performance is part of the Perth International Classic Guitar Festival. What else is happening as part of the festival that we can experience on July 28?

The festival runs from 28-30 July and is jam-packed with concerts, masterclasses, workshops and lectures by some sensational national and international artists. Colin Davin (USA) and Petra Petra Poláčková (Czech Republic) in particular are two of the best classical guitarists in the world right now, and are making their Australian debut on the festival. It’s definitely worth sticking around for the weekend!

The guitar is such a versatile instrument, and you can play so many styles of music on it. What was it that drew you to classical guitar?

I actually started out playing rock guitar, as many classical guitarists do, but the first classical guitar concert I saw as a teenager quite literally changed the course of my life. I had no idea that the guitar was capable of such complexity, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that I’ve continued on to this day. I still do play a bit of electric guitar, and earlier this year actually released an album called Luminescence entirely of new works for the instrument, but classical guitar is definitely “home” for me.

And for those that aren’t familiar, what differentiates classical guitar from others styles, like rock or jazz?

There’s actually not a straightforward answer! The instrument itself is a bit different – it’s a “Spanish-style” acoustic guitar, with nylon strings and a smaller body and wider neck than its steel-string cousins. And the technique is a bit different, especially noticeable with the right hand as we use our fingers to pluck the strings instead of a guitar pick. What really distinguishes it however is the music we play – whereas jazz and rock are largely improvisatory traditions, classical guitarists almost exclusively play notated music written in standard notation, drawing from a huge and varied repertoire composed all the way back in the Renaissance to the present day.

This performance was inspired by landscapes of Western Australia. As someone who came to WA from the USA what was the most distinctive thing about the natural environment of this state?

I’m from the northeast of the US, where the contrast between seasons can be extreme (40C to -20C!), and those extremes are reflected in the foliage. Hot summers bring dense, bright green leaves and colourful wildflowers; autumn brings a kaleidoscope of colours as the leaves turn varying shades before finally falling; snowy winters bring perpetual grey skies and stark bare branches and trunks – it looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland; and spring of course starts the whole process over again. While we certainly have our distinct seasons here in WA, for someone who had only ever experienced deciduous trees and plants the most striking (and disorienting) thing for me was the relative stability of the landscape throughout the year. And despite being here for 11 years now, it’s still weird to have Christmas in the middle of summer!

What’s next for you and Perth Guitar Quartet? Any more new works or performances we can look out for?

The quartet is planning on touring this program, both within WA and hopefully interstate . I think we owe it to the composers to get their works out to as wide an audience as possible. For me personally, my next project is in a duo with percussionist Paul Tanner. We’re in the process of commissioning a bunch of new works for guitar and percussion entirely by female composers – look out for that in 2024!