Guitar pioneer: Xuefei Yang

Xuefei Yang has achieved many firsts in her career as a classical guitarist, including being the first to graduate on the instrument from a Chinese conservatoire, the first Chinese musician to receive a full postgrad scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and the first Chinese guitarist to make a career on the world stage. Now based in the UK, with a dozen albums under her belt, she has been on the Askonas Holt roster since 2003.

People perhaps still think of classical guitar as a bit of niche instrument but you really had to be a pioneer growing up in China. Were you really the first the first person to study the classical guitar in a Chinese conservatoire?

In the whole country, yes! Because the guitar wasn’t accepted as an instrument back then, so I was squeezed in as an unofficial student for a few years before a proper faculty was set up. It was a big risk.

So you could have ended up not being able to get a recognised degree?

My parents wanted me to change instrument because they were worried about what kind of career I was going to have. If you think in the West, even a hundred years ago, before Segovia, classical guitar wasn’t fully accepted as a concert instrument but still, you could go to a conservatoire if your level was good enough and try and make a career for yourself. It wouldn’t be quite the same in China when I was starting because, after you graduate, you wouldn’t be allocated a job. The government decides if there’s a faculty. Now it’s different of course.

When I came to the UK in 2000 after I’d just graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor’s, I thought everything would be much better as a guitarist in the West, with much more opportunity. But actually I found things were only a little bit better. Classical guitar is still a niche interest. All over the world that’s the case.

Is part of the instrument’s relatively low profile down to a limited repertoire?

I don’t quite agree that the repertoire is limited. The mainstream classical repertoire, if you’re talking about Germany and Austria, yes it’s limited – Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, none of these composers wrote anything for guitar. But if you ask me about my own repertoire, I have loads to play: I have Latin American repertoire, plus throughout the 20th century lots of composers wrote good pieces, and in the Renaissance the lute was the main instrument, so there’s a lot there too.

How about playing with orchestra? Presumably a solo guitarist doesn’t get as many opportunities as, say, a violinist.

But if you think about violinists or pianists, yes they have loads of concertos but even they only ever get to play the same few. So when it comes to popular concertos for the guitar, ok, now it’s just one or two but it’s up to us to promote the others. Even Aranjuez [the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo], our one really famous concerto, it’s a great piece, but also it’s had some luck reaching a wider public, being used in films liked Brassed Off or, for instance, by Miles Davis in Sketches of Spain.

I try to commission new works, not just concertos, but solo and chamber pieces as well. I think it’s very important – you don’t know which one is going to turn out to be great, you have to keep doing it. And you have to inspire the composer and the composer has to inspire the players and you get into a positive loop. And maybe some pieces will turn out to be great, we don’t know – time will tell.

Could you tell us a bit about the process of commissioning new work? Do you work quite closely with the composers? Do you look for people who have experience of writing for the guitar or do you find a composer whose music you like and teach them about the instrument’s capabilities?

Both actually. In general I feel composers are quite scared about writing for the guitar because most of them don’t know how the instrument works. In that case, I would try to play for them while the work is in progress so they have an idea of how it will sound. Sometimes they’re really surprised and find themselves going in a new direction.

I’ve had new pieces from non-guitarist and guitarist composers, and I have found that the pieces written by non-guitarists are very musical, but they tend to not be guitaristic enough, and don’t make the most of the instrument. But then with guitarist composers it can be the opposite – that the piece is very guitaristic but the musical ideas get a bit lost among the technical elements.

Do you perform your own music?

So far only arrangements, but I would like to try and compose in the future. Though transcriptions for guitarists are very important. There are piano works, particularly by Spanish composers, which have become more popular on the guitar than in the original.

And for me as a musician, it is important to create my own arrangements. Knowing the original score and why decisions have been made – a crescendo here, a particular fingering there... it all affects the musical interpretation. I am very proud of my Bach concerto arrangements, and I worked very hard on them [two violin and one harpsichord concerto arranged for guitar and string quartet, recorded for EMI in 2012]. Bach’s music is incredibly versatile and very suitable for guitar.

In terms of the instrument itself: unlike the violin, the form of which was essentially standardised 300 years ago, the guitar is still developing, people are coming up with new construction methods and experimenting with new materials. Do you embrace these changes? Do you have a favourite guitar?

Yes, guitar making is very open and makers are constantly trying new things. The instrument basically developed along with the repertoire. I have a copy of a 19th-century guitar, for instance, which has a very sweet sound, but if you try to play modern music on it it just doesn’t work.

Ideally I would play a different guitar for different types of music: a 19thcentury guitar to play that repertoire, an older style to play Bach, a Spanish guitar for Spanish music, which is a very percussive, rhythmic style, and maybe a very ringing guitar to play song repertoire. But it’s not possible to take so many guitars on tour! At the most I’ve taken three guitars on stage, but for all my recordings I have used multiple guitars – because in the studio you have time to warm up and you don’t have to worry about volume.

In concert, I usually play a very modern guitar which is very untraditional, from the structure inside to the sound. It is made by Greg Smallman in Australia and is a perfect example of the modern school of making.

Although you have long been based in the UK, you travel a lot, including of course to China. How do you find performing there now, compared to when you were starting out?

I can feel a great energy around music in China. I feel quite excited. The pace of change is incredible. I was quite shocked by the number of concert halls being built, even in smaller cities. We have great hardware now, though we still need to work on the software, the audiences! That is changing too, however. Twenty years ago, maybe even ten years ago, giving a concert in Beijing you’d expect the audience to be noisy, with kids running around, and that is no longer the case – at least in Beijing, though it might be in smaller cities where there isn’t an established tradition of going to classical music concerts. But then you have to consider: ok, it’s nicer for me to play a recital in silence, but it’s also great that people are bringing children to concerts, and creating the audiences of the future. Maybe after a few years they will really fall in love with music.

At the very beginning when I would go back to China I would think I prefer the audiences in the West, where they are more educated, quieter, etc, but now I have a different attitude. Every time, after a concert, I do an album signing, it’s like I’m a pop star – I could be there signing for hours. I feel a great future for classical music there. The musical industry is not developed, it’s not mature you might say, but there is huge potential.

What interesting projects have you got coming up?

I have just recorded an album with a violinist. Going back to the guitar being a niche instrument, one thing we can do to make it more prominent and get it on the main stage is to merge with other instruments. And, personally, as much as I love solo work, I learn the most by collaborating with other musicians.

I am also preparing a solo disc for release next year, which will include transcriptions of music from China, both traditional and by contemporary composers. Many of our traditional instruments are plucked so the guitar is a very natural fit.

I included Chinese music on two of my early albums [2005’s Si Ji and 40 Degrees North from 2008] but the older I get the more I think I need to do this. I’ve played music from all different cultures but what about my own?

Kimon Daltas is an arts journalist and editor. Currently online editor for The Strad, he is former editor of Classical Music magazine