Local Talent Showcased
The Noonday Concert Series, Thursday at noon in July and August, brings in stellar performers and also showcases outstanding local musicians. The series was started more than 15 years ago as a a lunchtime concert where people could bring a brown-bag lunch while listening to the live music. Lunch is no longer part of the experience, but the local aspects have continued. Past concerts have included organ, bluegrass, and classical music.
The half-hour concerts are performed in the sanctuary of the Unitarian Church, which has one of the three remaining pipe organs built by William Goodrich and some of the best acoustics for music on the island. A $5 donation is requested.
This Thursday, July 12, classical guitarist Jim Sulzer will perform the Noonday Concert. Sulzer studied classical guitar while he was at Yale University and in Aspen Colorado. He is the author of Nantucket Daybreak and Mom Comes Home, and has recorded and produced numerous "sonic IDs" for public radio stations WCAI and WNAN, some of which were aired nationally on Ira Glass's "This American Life." He has taught at Nantucket Elementary School for 21 years and will join the faculty at the Nantucket New School this September.
He recently started performing on a guitar from the studio of Manuel Contreras in Madrid, Spain. The pieces he will be playing for the Noonday Concert are the ones he played in a workshop he attended at the Aspen Music Festival when he was 20, when he studied with the famous guitarist Oscar Ghiglia (one of the annointed disciples of Segovia). Sulzer's guitar was made by Manuel Contreras II, whose father built the original guitar for Segovia.
As another coincidence linking the past with the present, Sulzer will be revisiting the area out west this summer which he explored in 1972 at the end of the Aspen Guitar Workshop. He will once again explore the Grand Canyon and other natural wonders, only (as he says) this time he won't be hitch-hiking!
Upcoming Noonday Concerts will feature soprano Helen Hammond with pianist George Lopez and Armenian violinist Armen Ghazaryan with pianist and composer Robert Behrman.
