I think it was the spring of 2007 when the “world champion of step dance” Guillem Alonso visited the annual step dance event in Tallinn. I knew nothing about him and about the event, too. But appeared that the organizers were forced to find a guitarist that would perform the Asturias by Albeniz as Guillem had it in his program. It was part of the TapOlé program but since Guillem was alone in Tallinn he didn’t have his guitarists. So he thought that he would find somebody from Tallinn. For him it seemed natural as his parents are guitarists and apparently everyone among his friends can play the piece. It wasn’t the case here!
We have just about 3-5 professional classical guitarists in our country and nobody of them except me didn’t want to play the piece on the big stage. I had not played this piece either because I started my guitar studies quite late and at the academy did not have time for this kind of “childish” music any more 🙂 So it seemed as an interesting challange to me – master the Asturias in 3 days!
The performance was a success and once again I realised that the RHYTM is something that you cannot deny in music. It is obvious – when a dancer is in the air then the gravitation will bring him down exaclty “on time”. He cannot stay in the air longer to wait till I get my chords on! But this time I was prepared and from that time on I felt much better.