Guitar Concert with Lucian Plessner

Thursday, February 23 6:30pm

Martin Meyer Sanctuary

Congregation Emanu El and the German Consulate General in San Francisco have the pleasure of inviting you to a guitar concert by Lucian Plessner.'

This recital features one of the masterpieces originally written for guitar, the Cavatina by Alexandre Tansman, and Mr. Plessner’s arrangements of Leonard Bernstein’s music made on the composer’s personal request.

Mr. Plessner will perform the music and give an insight onto the lives and the backgrounds of the compositions of these two flamboyant musicians.

You are welcome to visit Mr. Plessner’s videos On Jewish Music Part I and II, his contribution to the official Festive year 1700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany on: www.lucian-plessner.com

Lucian Plessner taught himself to play the guitar and gave his first recital at the age of fifteen. After his studies at the Musikhochschule Köln, Lucian Plessner lived for five years in Córdoba, Andalusia. The pianist Alexis Weissenberg recommended him to Alicia de Larrocha, with whom he worked on his Spanish concert repertoire. In 1987 he caused a sensation in the music world when a Spanish concert agency hired him "as a foreigner" for a solo tour throughout the country.

Particular attention Lucian Plessner caused in 1989 with his arrangements of Leonard Bernstein's music for the guitar, which he made on the composer’s personal request (CD Bernstein on Guitar, cpo/DeutschlandRadio). He performed this program worldwide f.e. in Moscow, Munich, Hamburg, the Konzerthaus Wien, the N.Y.U., the "Kfar Blum Festival" in Israel on the fifth anniversary of Leonard Bernstein's death, the Settimane Musicali di Stresa e del Lago Maggiore, where he appeared alongside with celebrities like Vladimir Ashkenazy, Shlomo Mintz and Mstislav Rostropovich, and at the Leonard Bernstein Festival Boston to Broadway at Harvard University.

In 1994, he performed his Bernstein program for Lord Yehudi Menuhin on his birthday.

In addition to his solo performances, Lucian Plessner has created several projects with actor Klaus Maria Brandauer featuring a literature-music dialogue.

Recent concert tours brought Lucian Plessner to Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and repeated invitations to the Mahalla Festival in Istanbul and to Mexico-City.

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