Earlier this month, Miloš Karadaglić signed off on the final proof of his forthcoming recording of the Concierto de Aranjuez, probably the most beloved classical guitar concerto in the world.
He’s delighted with how it came out.
“It’s everything I ever wanted. It’s a very special recording for me,” said Karadaglić, the rising young guitarist who recorded the emblematic Joaquin Rodrigo work and the same composer’s Fantasia para un Gentilhombre along with French conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the London Philharmonic. The record, due out in February or March, also contains some solo pieces, the names of which he wants to keep under wraps for now.
The second movement of the Aranjuez is the best-known part of the concerto, with its famously moody, noble melody, and just as famously exposed a moment for the guitarist’s first entrance, which Karadaglić says is not as treacherous a proposition as it might seem.
“When it’s right, I get the goosebumps in my hair, and I know it’s right. That’s the nicest feeling in the world,” he said. “With a piece like that, you just have to follow your inner voice and use your guitar not thinking of the limits, but of all the beautiful things it is able to do.
“I just think about, instead of notes dying away, I think of those notes continuing and melting one into another, and it creates the most beautiful effects,” he said. “You are able to be a singer with your instrument, and it’s the most wonderful thing. With the recording, I think it just ‘happened,’ and it was perfect. I thought it was exactly how it should be.”
This week, Karadaglić comes to South Florida for two appearances in which he’ll showcase his current solo album, Canción, which was released this month on Deutsche Grammophon. Thursday night, he’ll inaugurate the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach series at Mar-a-Lago, a six-concert lineup founded by Michael Finn, former executive director of the Palm Beach Symphony.
On Friday, he’s at the National YoungArts Foundation in Miami to open that venue’s participation in Yellow Lounge, a classical music series designed for a club-style environment by Universal Music Group, which owns Deutsche Grammophon. In Miami, Karadaglić will be joined by violinist Andrea Jarrett and cellist Peter Eom, both alumni of the YoungArts program.
Yellow Lounge has its roots in the European club scene, and Karadaglić has been the featured artist this month in Lounge events in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.
“I have done things like this from the very beginning of when I started my international career,” he said, speaking by phone from a New York hotel room. “I always felt that the guitar is an instrument which you can take into those spaces and it will be enjoyed because it allows you to be a rock star for the night; you play an instrument which is so mainstream at the same time as being classical. It’s almost a match made in heaven.
“It has been so different from place to place, from continent to continent, and it’s such a great concept: To bring classical music on the absolute highest level — not because I am playing, but generally, from all of my colleagues at DG — and bring it to a place where people normally wouldn’t come to listen to it,” he said. “So we’ve had thousands of people lined up in front of [the Old Vic] Tunnels in London, and the coolest and trendiest crowds … All sorts of these places brought a different energy, and some of those concerts have been the most memorable of my career.”
Karadaglić made his U.S. debut less than three years ago in South Florida, when he appeared at the Festival of the Arts Boca in March 2011, a concert he recalls today with fondness.
“It was open-air, it was warm, very balmy, I was playing Spanish guitar repertoire because that was the CD I’d just recorded, ‘Mediterráneo,’” he said. “It was a very cozy, very warm and very intimate audience. It was really wonderful.”
It has been a relatively rapid rise to success for Karadaglić, 30, who was born in Montenegro, a small nation in the former Yugoslavia that won its independence in 2006. The son of an economist, he began playing an acoustic guitar at age 8 with dreams of becoming a pop star. But his progress in the classical repertoire suggested a different path, and at 16, he applied for and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, a city he now calls home.
“It’s really odd, but I have never, ever had an urge to play any guitar apart from the classical guitar. I never wanted to even touch an electric guitar. Once, I did, and I felt I could hurt myself because the strings were metal,” he said. “I was just enchanted always by the sound, and the quality of the sound, and the colors you can produce on the classical guitar. I just wanted to explore that, because that spoke to me in a much more deep and special way than I had heard or experienced up to that point.”
In a video from his childhood in Montenegro that was included on a British documentary about Karadaglić, the guitarist can be seen singing and strumming his instrument in front of a large group of young girls, dancing and singing along. This was during wartime, when Yugoslavia had descended into violence and division, and today Karadaglić appreciates what that experience gave him.
“When I was strumming the guitar and singing in front of dancing girls, that was such a different time in Montenegro. We were just kids, and were trying to be happy and to do something fun,” he said. “And those were some of the most beautiful moments in my life, because we managed to stay happy and be shielded from the environment … and it was through music, through my classical guitar, and also through those cheesy children’s pop songs.
“And I’m very grateful for that, because I think I would have grown to be a very different person if I didn’t have that experience,” he said.
Karadaglić’s first release, Mediterráneo, became one of the best-selling traditional classical albums worldwide in 2011, and its 2012 followup, Pasión, won a Classic Brit award in Britain and an Echo Klassik award in Germany.
His current disc, Canción, which was released Nov. 5, contains some of the best-known Latin pop classics of an earlier era — including Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Girl from Ipanema, Consuelo Velázquez’s Besame Mucho, and Armando Manzanero’s Somos Novios — in new arrangements crafted by Brazilian guitarist and composer Sergio Assad. The record also features Piazzolla’s Libertango and a treatment of a portion of Ravel’s Bolero, as well as music by Boccherini and two etudes by Villa-Lobos.
“On ‘Pasión,’ I had a lot of South American standards and pieces which are really in the core of the guitar repertoire, but I didn’t have any really famous classic South American songs because I was worried about it, and didn’t think they could be done properly without being cheesy or crossover,” he said. “But before I moved on to the next project, I just felt that I wanted to say something else, I wanted to try something a little bit more out of the comfort zone.”
He found that in programming the songs with the Assad arrangements, which let him play them in a way that was “idiomatic and natural for the classical guitar,” he said. “I just couldn’t imagine anyone who could do a better job. And now I will play ‘Besame Mucho’ at the Concertgebouw and I will not be ashamed of it, because I think the arrangements are just incredible.”
Throughout the disc, Karadaglić plays with spotless technique, a strong sense of taste and elegance, and a palpable sense of intimacy, all of which help put these hugely familiar songs in a fresh light.
“With something like ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ the beauty of the arrangement is in the simplicity … And then you have something like ‘Más Que Nada’ or ‘Besame Mucho,’ and those two are just on fire … You recognize the melody, and it’s a super-famous melody, but it’s so challenging to play it,” he said.
Karadaglić said the repertoire he has chosen for the first three discs has been part of a strategy to form a durable relationship with his audience.
“First, I need to create a solid core in order to build,” he said. “I really believe that this instrument can be an instrument for all the people, and that it can come out of the guitar niche, which is very strong, and which is wonderful in one way, but very limiting in another. I can establish that core with repertoire that will inspire people and that people will enjoy … and then you take your audience with you into the more challenging spheres of the repertoire.”
That’s over and above other standards he wants to record, such as the lute suites of J.S. Bach, “because it’s a very natural part of the repertoire for me, and there is almost no recital in which I don’t play Bach,” he said.
“But what I would love to do most is commission new pieces, and commission new concertos, and collaborate with artists,” Karadaglić said. “It’s just that the right commissions and the right collaborations need to come on the horizon, and those are coming closer and closer with every day, and with more people that appreciate what I do.
“That way you have a stronger calling, and you are able to influence major composers to write for the guitar, which will then create a new wave of the development of the instrument, or encourage a new audience to come to the concerts. And then we create a new audience for everybody.”
Despite its familiarity, or perhaps because of it, Karadaglić thinks the guitar could use some more attention.
“I’m doing the best I can, and I’m really happy doing what I’m doing, but I don’t think about it in any kind of selfish way. I just do it because I love it, and I hope it will make things better, or make people more friendly toward the guitar,” he said.
“There are so many guitarists in this world, and so many great guitarists in this world, and I just want the guitar to be heard.”
Miloš Karadaglić appears at 7 p.m. Thursday on the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach’s Great Performers series at Mar-a-Lago; tickets are $125, which include a cocktail reception before the performance. Call 561-379-6773 for more information; the society’s full website at www.cmspb.org will be operative Dec. 2. On Friday, he’s at the Yellow Lounge at Miami’s YoungArts Foundation campus on Biscayne Boulevard. That 8 p.m. concert is $20; visit youngarts.org to buy tickets in advance.