Tampa Bay Symphony features celebrated guitarist Parris

The centerpiece of the Tampa Bay Symphony's winter concert is known by ear, if not by name.

By John Bancroft, Special to the Times
Published February 21, 2008

ADVERTISEMENT [Special to the Times] Symphony guest soloist John Michael Parris calls Joachin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez "a hidden cultural icon."

A French/Spanish Connection

The Tampa Bay Symphony, with guest soloist John Michael Parris, performs at 8 p.m. Friday at Mahaffey Theater, 400 First St. S, St. Petersburg; at 4 p.m. Sunday in Ferguson Hall at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 1010 N MacInnes Place, Tampa; and at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 McMullen-Booth Road, Clearwater. Tickets for unreserved seating ($15) will be available at the door at all three venues. Call (727) 442-3696 for information.

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Joachin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez is one of those pieces of music everybody knows, yet hardly anyone can name.

The Spanish composer's 1940 masterpiece seems to be everywhere. It has ornamented movie soundtracks. Jazzman Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain echoes it. It's even been heard in television commercials.

Guitarist John Michael Parris will play it this weekend, as soloist with the Tampa Bay Symphony.

The concerto "is one of my favorites," Parris said recently from his home in Odessa. "It really is amazingly beautiful and moving, especially the slow second movement."

Parris calls the concerto, especially that intensely lyrical adagio movement, "a hidden cultural icon." It's a piece many believe to be inspired by a bucolic setting, but in fact came out of a tragedy in the composer's life.

Concierto de Aranjuez promises to be the highlight of a program dubbed "A French/Spanish Connection," which the all-volunteer 90-member orchestra will perform Friday at Mahaffey Theater, Sunday at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and Wednesday at Ruth Eckerd Hall.

Also featured will be St. Petersburg composer Vernon Taranto Jr.'s Capriccio and Fantasy Waltz, Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture, Dances from Manuel De Falla's ballet el Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat), and Bizet's l'Arlesienne (Suite No. 2).

Parris, chairman of the Fine Arts Department and classical guitar instructor at Tampa's Blake High School for the Arts, chose the Rodrigo work in consultation with the symphony's musical director and conductor Jack Heller, with whom Parris once worked at the University of South Florida.

One of the longtime champions of both the concerto and its composer is legendary guitarist Pepe Romero, with whom Parris studied during summer workshops and master classes as a student in Houston.

"Pepe Romero was one of the greatest influences in my musical life," Parris said. "He was a great inspiration."

In a 1995 interview with Saint Paul Sunday host Bill McGlaughlin, Romero remembered his friend Rodrigo, who died in 1999 at the age of 97. He discussed the origin of his most famous work, clearing up a misconception fostered by the composer himself, that the adagio "is about the wind in the trees at the Spanish summer palace of Aranjuez."

In fact, Romero said, the blind composer and pianist (he wrote music in Braille) and his wife, Victoria, also a professional musician, "had just lost their first baby. And the whole second movement (the adagio) was his way of conversing with God. And you have the pulse that goes on the complete time and is taken by the orchestra . . .

"And the melody, first with the English horn, then with the guitar, and then going through all the different instruments in the orchestra . . . is all the different passions and feelings and emotions that he feels. . . . The pulse is always in it. And then at the end of the tutti (all the instruments of the orchestra playing together) when the guitar comes back, that is the accepting of God's will, and the feeling of peace, and the movement ends with the ascension of the soul of the baby."

Parris, 45, who performs less than he once did now that he is so heavily involved in teaching 35 to 40 guitar students each year at Blake, says he hasn't performed the Aranjuez in several years and looks forward to the opportunity to rekindle an old flame.

John Bancroft is a freelance writer who lives in Bradenton.

[Last modified February 20, 2008, 18:55:17]