Alirio Diaz Interpreta Melodias Larenses

It was a rainy night and Andres Segovia had just given an incredible guitar concert in Dallas, Tx. My teacher and close mentor Robert Guthrie was lucky enough to hear him play that night and followed him to his hotel in the hopes of playing for the maestro. When he knocked on the door, Segovia welcomed him inside and listened to Mr. Guthrie play for hours. The unexpected meeting turned into a long lesson that ended with Segovia giving him the phone number for the North Carolina School of the Arts, promising him an artistic scholarship to study at the University. At the age of 22, Robert Guthrie had impressed the man who elevated the respect for the classical guitar to a collegiate/professional level. Unfortunately, this was before the advent of the internet and Mr. Guthrie lost the phone number. However, he saw an advertisement for the school in a local newspaper and was able to accept the scholarship and attend UNCSA for his undergraduate studies.

After studying at UNCSA, which included a few additional lessons with Segovia, he set off to study in Caracas, Venezuela with Alirio Diaz. Upon his arrival, he quickly discovered that there was a first round of auditions that determined who got to study at the University and who would fly back home. When it was his turn to play, he recalls seeing the guitarist before him leave flustered and pale in the face. Maestro Alirio Diaz, guitarist Fredy Reyna, composers Antonio Lauro and Vicente Soto, as well as university faculty, all sat in the auditorium. When Mr. Guthrie entered the stage, he sat down and was asked to play Etude No. 7 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. He recalls playing the well-known E major scale at the start of the piece with lightning rest-stroke speed and accuracy, getting a “woo!” from some Venezuelan guy in the audience. Long story short, they accepted him in a heartbeat.

It is the dedication of my teacher and the great guitarists he studied with that inspire me to play the music that they have spent their lives performing and mastering. The audio in this video was digitized from a cassette tape that Alirio Diaz had given to Mr. Guthrie in the ‘80s when they both happened to be giving concerts in Rome. Because most homes in Italy do not have A/C, they had to meet at night because it was too hot to have two people inside during the day. The first image of the insane stretch is a picture that Mr. Guthrie took in Alirio’s apartment that summer in Rome.