Grammy-winning classical guitarist Jason Vieaux is a musician of consummate artistry. He’s also the kind of guy with whom you can sit down and have a nice chat.
That’s exactly what I did recently when Vieaux stopped by to play some Bach for us in WOSU’s Performance Studio.
Don’t miss Vieaux’s video performance of the uplifting Prelude to Bach’s First Solo Cello Suite. Also listen to our conversation to learn Vieaux’s remarkable story about how he found his way from his very first guitar – given to him when he was five years old – to his world-class career.
But if you’re thinking music geek all the way – think again. During his growing-up years in Buffalo, New York, Vieaux took street hockey matches and daily classical guitar practice in stride.
“I was one of these kind of weird kids where – I come from a very blue-collar family, so we loved sports, played street hockey and I played soccer and this kind of thing, but my parents really never had to tell me to practice. I would just kind of go do it,” Vieaux said.
Today, Vieaux does a lot of things, including serving on the faculties of two of the nation’s most prestigious conservatories of music – the Cleveland Institute of Music and Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music – performing around the world with a roster of collaborators that reads like a Who’s Who of classical music, and releasing a steady stream of recordings, including, soon, a new one of original guitar works.
Transcript of Interview
Jennifer Hambrick: I’m speaking with Grammy winner Jason Vieaux. Jason, thanks so much for taking the time to visit us again. Welcome back to WOSU, because you were here several years ago.
Jason Vieaux: Yeah. I’ve been here a few times, actually. Fuzzy on what years exactly, but yeah.
Jennifer Hambrick: Yeah, in those pre-pandemic days. It seems like another world, doesn’t it.
Jason: Yes, it’s amazing.
Jennifer Hambrick: We just came from WOSU’s Performance Studio where you actually performed for us the Prelude from the First Solo Cello Suite by J.S. Bach. How those solo cello suites were sort of rediscovered is a whole, kind of, one of the great rescue stories, as it were, in classical music.
Jason Vieaux: Yeah.
Jennifer Hambrick: It seems like every cellist, now every guitarist, kind of has a story about how they discovered the Bach cello suites. But what is your story with the Bach Cello Suites?
Jason Vieaux: Well, I don’t really play a lot of them – at least yet. That may be a future project that I’d like to explore. My most recent CD was sort of a solo violin works CD. So maybe the next one might be a cello one. Right now, I’m really kind of deep into this year playing the Fourth Lute Suite, which is Bach’s adaptation of the Third Violin Partita, and also the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro originally for lute, BWV 998, and also the First Violin Sonata, from, again, the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin. So those are the three that I’m sort of carrying around this season. I mean, that’s kind of plenty for me, actually, because I have a lot of other repertoire that I like to play, as well.
Jennifer Hambrick: There’s the whole historically informed performance practice phenomenon – there’s that whole approach to playing Bach, and certainly playing earlier music. But I also – the former piccolo player with the Cleveland Orchestra once told me, a man who has 20 children is a romantic at heart, you know what I mean? So, in other words, you hear Bach, really, across a spectrum of performance styles these days. So, what is your take on playing Bach?
Jason Vieaux: I’m not sure, really, how I would define it. I mean, Bach’s music is so endlessly adaptable to all those different approaches. I mean, I definitely have learned a lot from lute players. In more recent years I’ve taken a lot from that. But, you know, I greatly admire someone like a guitarist – I’d say modern guitarists, like Paul Galbraith, and his approach, which was kind of influenced by Glenn Gould, of having more of a specific articulation to, say, like a bass voice. And what that does on a modern guitar is, it kind of puts oxygen, sort of more air between the voices. Because not only you can hear the bass more clearly if you have, like, a focused articulation plan for it, but it also, in turn, allows you to hear the other voices more clearly, rather than playing everything as legato as you can. So I do like those kind of modern approaches. I think it’s some kind of weird mix of that, I guess.
Jennifer Hambrick: Obviously, through the years as I’ve followed your career, I’ve read a lot about you, about your career, you know, and so forth. I don’t believe that I have read your origin story, so to speak, as a guitarist. How did you come to play the guitar?
Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Well, I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. I came to Cleveland at age 17 to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music with John Holmquist. But before that, I started guitar, I would say, either a week before or a week after my eighth birthday – I’m not really exactly sure when. It would have been in July – that summer with a founding member of the Buffalo Guitar Quartet named Jeremy Sparks. And he was their primary arranger. And I had my earliest chamber music experiences doing duos with him in lessons, as well as learning solo pieces and practicing scales and arpeggios, this kind of thing, for about eight years there. But before that, my mother had brought home a guitar when I was five. One evening coming home from work, she bought, like, a $50 guitar, probably not knowing it was a classical guitar. I don’t think my parents would have really known there was – I’m sure they did not know there was any kind of repertoire for the instrument that went back, you know, to the Renaissance and the vihuela or anything like that. Because my dad’s record collection was entirely modern jazz, and my mother’s record collection was, you know, stuff you could dance to – like R&B and soul, the ‘60s, the good stuff – and some of the British Invasion bands, like The Beatles and The Animals, the Bay Area stuff like Lovin’ Spoonful, Mamas & Papas and stuff like that. I think they had one classical record in their collection between them, and it was Leonard Bernstein conducting New York Phil, Rhapsody in Blue. That was, like, the only classical record. So, I came to kind of learn the language of classical guitar through the nineteenth-century guitarists like Mauro Giuliani, the Italian, the Spanish guitarists – Fernando Sor. That’s sort of how I learned the classical – kind of Haydn, Mozart, generally central-European language was through those composers, who were very important. Giuliani was a major figure in Vienna. Knew Beethoven and a lot of the composers of the time. So, it was really just through lessons that I began to do it. And I was one of these kind of weird kids where – I come from a very blue-collar family, so we loved sports, played street hockey and I played soccer and this kind of thing, but my parents really never had to tell me to practice. I would just kind of go do it. I enjoyed it. And still do.
Jennifer Hambrick: Sure, sure. And so, it was all kind of fate, in the sense that your parents bring home this guitar, and you just started playing it.
Jason Vieaux: Yeah, it seems like it. Because a lot of the major guitarists at the time, either in Buffalo, if I played for Pepe Romero, or in Rochester, where I played for David Russell, the Scottish Grammy-winning guitarist, Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Liona Boyd – it was like this thing where they would say to my teacher, Jeremy, “Where are his parents? We’d like to speak with them.” It was always, like, this kind of thing. And then you slowly got this sense, like, that it wasn’t a normal, like, playing level. But it was really the international players that really gave my parents and my teacher the sense that there was something a little bit more there, that I had a shot at doing it if I wanted to do it.
Jennifer Hambrick: So, the Bach that you just played – it’s one of these beautiful movements, very, very familiar, probably people have heard it before. Maybe they don’t know where they’ve heard it before or what it is, but they know they know it. But it sounds so easy. But there’s a lot of architecture going on in that movement.
Jason Vieaux: Yeah, I mean, that’s what’s so wonderful about studying Bach, is kind of looking inside the house or the cathedral and seeing how he put it together, and then he put this other one together, and then he did this other one. The fugues, in particular, are very interesting. Yeah, it’s wonderful to study, and I’m always finding new things, too. It’s a little frustrating, because when I find something ne w in the polyphony or in the implied polyphony, like I want to down-stem something from the up-stem – this is a little getting nerdy – but you find something like that, and It’s like, Oh, I could do this if I changed my fingerings. So, I’ve sort of revised a lot of the fingerings of that cello suite and the lute stuff three or four times. But it’s like once you see something or hear something, it’s like, I can’t not do it. It’s sort of like relearning it again.
Jennifer Hambrick. Yeah, yeah. So, you studied at the Cleveland Institute and you are now teaching, you are now on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute.
Jason Vieaux: Yeah, it’s my 27th, 28th year. It’s hard to believe, really.
Jennifer Hambrick: Yeah. So, you live in Ohio.
Jason Vieaux: Yeah, I live in the Cleveland area. I live in Lakewood.
Jennifer Hambrick: Yeah, okay. Do you consider yourself now an Ohioan, after 27 years?
Jason Vieaux: Yeah, I think so, yeah. I don’t root for the Browns, though. I still root for the Bills.
Jennifer Hambrick: Oh.
Jason Vieaux: I never switched my allegiance.
Jennifer Hambrick: We can edit this part of the interview out.
[Laughter]
Jennifer Hambrick: … just to reassure you, if that’s …
Jason Vieaux: No, that’s okay.
Jennifer Hambrick: Next projects?
Jason Vieaux: During the pandemic I actually wrote, like, about 60 minutes of music, so that’s actually going to be the next album.
Jennifer Hambrick: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Jason Vieaux: That was actually my label – Azica Records – that was their idea. Initially it was going to be my arrangements plus some of the pieces. And that was the plan. We recorded, I don’t know, about 35 minutes of it last spring, and then we’re going to do the rest of it in January. And I was thinking like, oh, okay, well, so when I come back in January, we’ll do some of the arrangements and we’ll have a record. And my producer, Alan Bise, was like, “Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you about that,” as we’re packing up, right? He said, “Are these all the ones that you want to record?” So I said, “Yeah, the other ones, I don’t know if they’d really make a record type of thing.” He said, “Well, if you could write 15 to 20 minutes roughly more stuff, I think that should just be like a composition record. And then we do another separate record of arrangements,” because I probably do have about an hour’s worth of jazz or pop song arrangements. So right now, that’s the plan, in a way, to put out two, kind of, almost decidedly – well, one non-classical record, I guess. They’re concert pieces. And I’m playing the one wherever I do a solo recital now. It’s a tremolo piece called Home.
Jennifer Hambrick: Tell me more about this album of your compositions. Does it have a theme?
Jason Vieaux: Not really. It’s just stuff that I wrote. During the pandemic, I mean, I didn’t have – most of us traveling classical music performers, we didn’t really have anywhere to play for a while, except for the occasional livestream. We were still teaching onsite at CIM, but for Curtis Institute of Music, the other school I teach at in Philadelphia, we were all online on Zoom. So I was at home, like, a lot. So I used that spare time – you know, after at that point about 25 years of touring, I’m sort of a conditioned animal, in the sense that I don’t really like practicing a piece if I’m not going to be playing it somewhere. So I put that energy into, kind of, writing things, writing pieces or etudes or something, and then practicing those, just for my own enjoyment and also to keep my hands sharp. And so that’s how all that came about, really.
Jennifer Hambrick: So, a recording’s worth, about an hour’s worth, I think you said, of shorter concert pieces?
Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Nothing real fancy. They’re harmless pieces, really. They’re not overly ambitious or anything. They’re just things – I think they sound good on the guitar, and I like playing them.
Jennifer Hambrick: I think you said the title of the recording…
Jason Vieaux: He wants to call it J.V., my initials, because that’s what he calls me. “J.V., J.V. What’s going on? It’s Alan.”
Jennifer Hambrick: But to be determined?
Jason Vieaux: Well, no, I think it’s going to be called J.V. If Alan wants it to be called J.V., then that’s going to be the title. I’m not going to …
Jennifer Hambrick: Gotcha. All right. That’s his job, huh?
Jason Vieaux: I did insist that the last recording have Bach’s name on it, though. The Bach Volume 2. I had to put my foot down for that one.
Jennifer Hambrick: I think – any producer, I would think, in his right mind would give Bach a pass, right?
[laughter]
Jason Vieaux: Yeah.
Jennifer Hambrick: Jason Vieaux, it has been a great pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. Hope you come back soon.
Jason Vieaux: Great, thanks a lot.
