Jorge Caballero is an artist familiar to Guitar Review readers. In 1996 he became the first guitarist to win the prestigious Walter Naumburg Competition. In the decade since, Caballero has continued to develop from prodigy to mature artist and has established himself as one of the greatest performers and teachers of his generation. He gives recitals regularly throughout the United States and has performed with numerous orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, Kansas City Chamber Orchestra, and the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. his love of orchestral repertoire inspired him to record Kazuhito Yamashita's infamous transcription of Dvorak's New World Symphony exclusively for this issue of Guitar Review.

Tell me about how you came to this piece. What compelled you to record it for Guitar Review?

    Well, I learned the piece when I was nineteen and living in Peru. I started performing it again last year, beginning with a concert that I did in St. Louis in the early part of the year. later in the year, I also performed it for the New York Classical Guitar Society. There were two reasons why I recorded it, really. First, it was a personal dream of mine to be able to do something like this. Since I came into contact with the piece, which was when I was about fifteen years old, I envisioned myself getting to a point at which I would be capable of playing-and capable of recording- such a piece. Second, I feel like justice is never completely done to pieces of this nature in that they generally only receive one recorded performance. It didn't make sense to me that a piece like this should remain buried in the history of the instrument, especially since I am fortunate enough to have the ability to play it.

Having known Yamashita's recording, what did you seek to accomplish with your interpretation?

    My objective was not so much to capture the symphonic effect of the piece, but to highlight the structural and thematic aspects of the piece, making sure these motives and ideas were presented clearly. I wasn't interested in a performance that was simply about technical elements and how I was able to handle them. Yamashita's style at that point in his career - he was twenty-six or twenty-seven when he recorded the piece - was based on contrasts. So you have moments that are particularly soft or particularly slow and then moments that are incredibly explosive. He tended to use fewer gradations of dynamic and color. Now, I am certainly not criticizing that approach - it's just one performer's personality. However, if one is to perform a transcription of this nature - that is, so much os the transcription is attached to the particular personality of the transcriber/player, the goal should not be to simply imitate that accomplishment, but to draw out the real musical elements of the work and express them with ones own personality. So in that sense there was a lot of musical crafting that went into bringing out the various textures. My concern was to ensure that voices spoke independently and clearly, and that the piece as a whole had a clear arc. it was also important to me that the movements themselves had a clear structure that would be easy to perceive, and that the transitional elements were also clearly presented.
    Listening to the recording I made, I am for the most part quite pleased with the result. The experience of playing something like this is so different from actually hearing it. I enjoy listening to the recording now because I have enough distance from it. Now I can say, "Wow, is that really me playing?"

Yes, I've always enjoyed the experience of listening to a recording after having had the time and space to forget all of the details - both positive and negative - of the performance.

    Right...and this piece is so intricate that it's easy to forget certain things because there is so much effort involved. Of course, right now, after having made the recording, I have to be concerned with how to translate the ideas I developed during the recording process to the stage. I have played it since making this recording and I've felt a higher responsibility to articulate these ideas. That challenge has made me a better player.

Do you feel drawn to orchestral transcriptions in general?

    I do, actually, and it's not so much because I think that the natural element or natural medium is lacking, of course. It's more about a personal necessity to express something, and I find these pieces to be the best vehicles to express that something in spite of how difficult they can be. For example, I work with a string quartet and I'm thinking of making transcriptions of orchestral works for our ensemble because I like the repertoire, and I feel that we can reach a higher level of musical expression through certain pieces in spite of the fact that they were - unfortunately - not written for our ensemble. Because, however, of their inherent musical quality, I feel that if I can find a way to make them work, I can achieve a higher level of musical expression. So it has nothing to do with a belief that the quality of music that the guitar possesses is inferior, but is more about my personal necessity for expression through certain pieces.

Are you just as interested in listening to other artists' recordings of transcriptions?

    Yes, as long as they work.

I suppose what I'm wondering is, to what extent is it about a personal challenge and a vehicle for personal musical expression, and to what extent is it about an interest in a specific musical concept - that of taking a composer's musical idea and translating it to another medium?

    That's a pretty good question. I think that takes us to a deeper question about who we are as individuals. I think that when we have a certain talent, or feel that we have a certain ability to accomplish something, we are always looking for ways to fully comprehend and understand the potential of that talent. As such, my interests are absolutely personal in the sense that I am trying to see just how far I can develop whatever qualities or whatever gifts I have as a musician and as a player of an instrument. I feel like I have an interest in this approach because it presents challenges for me that give me meaning and reason to pursue greater objectives. The tastes that I have, ironically, tend to be different in so many ways. For example, if I were to write music, i would not write anything particularly complicated, because I like the simple element of sound and I always proceed from that perspective.
    Your question addresses two completely different aspects of the personality of an individual. First is what a person likes, and second is what a person's aims are in life. i like a number of different things from the classical field, from medieval and renaissance to non-western music. As a performer and a musician, I have a particular direction that provides me with satisfaction at this point in my life. These are two completely different things and you cannot really relate one to the other.
I can't simply say, "I like the process of transcription regardless of instrument(s), so consequently I'm going to do that myself." That's not the way i perceive it. As far as myself as a guitarist, and as a guitarist in relation to being a musician, i sometimes feel that I like to have a larger object to deal with - I get a great deal of satisfaction out of such an experience. It's not necessarily the intrinsic process of something being transported from one place to another.

Are you currently working on any transcriptions?

    Yes. I am looking at some Mozart piano music as well as some Rimsky-Korsakov. I am in the early stages, just investigating whether or not certain pieces will work. One problem in working with music from the classical or romantic period is that normally as guitarists, we don't have to deal with a lot of melodies. Even a motive that's turned into a direct melody could present an issue. We normally work with little ideas, and they tend to be not melodic in nature. Not in all cases, of course, but there are few instances where we're dealing with an entire melody, having to think carefully about sustain and keeping the intensity of the melody over the course of several measures or periods of a phrase. These requirements rarely appear in the guitar's literature, so of course that's one of the difficult things about dealing with Mozart - the motives are so spread out and develop in a sort of linear narrative. One has to think about how to maneuver through all these ideas in a way in which will make them sound thematic.

How has your technique evolved such that you now feel better equipped to address these issues than you were five or ten years ago, when you were already playing at a very high level?

    Well, the most important, thing about it is that it's becoming freer. Technique is a system - it is a system that has certain rules and mechanical figurations that may seem complicated at first. Eventually, however, you can get to a point where you will find that if you take the right steps to accomplish certain things, they actually will come out well. This, to me, is a key to the mechanical process of playing the guitar.
    Technique is such an intricate concept that it can take many, many decades for a musician to develop a sense of how they can make it work for them in trying to create a musical idea. One can imagine a point at which technique is so ingrained in one's body that it can be used simply as a way of speaking as with any other language. This is one thing that I am beginning to see in my playing. I am starting to feel that my technique - all the calculations that are necessary to accomplish something - are already a natural process.


Interview published by Guitar Review. For more information, please visit www.guitarreview.com