Harvard resident Dave McLellan and Nikolaus Hunt, in his 10th year as Bromfield music educator and choral accompanist, will perform a concert Sunday, Jan. 28, at Five-sparks, 7 Fairbank Street, from 4 to 5 p.m. McLellan, a classical guitarist, described the program as having three discrete parts.
McLellan will begin as a soloist with “Booster Suite.” Then Hunt, a classical and jazz pianist, and McLellan will play a concerto by the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a work the two first collaborated on for a benefit performance in 2018. The concert will close with McLellan playing a Scottish ballad. McLellan believes it is important for a performer to be also a communicator, so he will talk about each piece, saying something about the composer or song’s origin and pointing out what the audience should listen for. All proceeds from the admission fee of $25 will go to Fivesparks.
The “Booster Suite” is a somewhat odd collection of songs, McLellan said, having no connection to one another except that they were all chosen by members of the Moving West Dance Theater. The second to last song in the suite is “Canarios,” a “frenetic dance,” while the last is an African lullaby that starts with heartbeats and reflects a mother’s changing moods.
The centerpiece of the concert is Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Concerto for Guitar and Piano #1, Opus 99. McLellan described Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who fled fascist Italy and came to the United States in 1939, as an influential teacher, who mentored great musicians like Nelson Riddle, Andre Previn, and John Williams. He was “an unassuming little guy teaching the greats.” McLellan sees the concerto as third or fourth on a list of top 40 guitar pieces. He discovered it his junior year of college and spent hundreds of hours in practice. “It’s playable for me,” he said, more accessible than some other well-known works. Hunt added, “It’s a well-put-together piece, with a lot of contrasts.” Because he himself plays different styles, for him, it’s the variety in the piece that makes it such fun to play.
The opening is sonata allegro form; it’s light, fun, and appealing—“Tedesco wanted people to think of Mozart,” said McLellan. The second movement is a lilting, slow romance, and then the third ends with a lightning-speed Spanish dance, with huge chords that will remind people of the exciting sound track from a grade B Western movie, McLellan said. In fact, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was hired by MGM in the ’40s to write film scores for Westerns and did so until his death in 1968.
To end on a calming note and send people home “with an earworm” is a Scottish ballad that McLellan describes as an incredible closure—“tearjerkingly beautiful.”
A young guitarist
McLellan, who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, is one of those people who can pinpoint the experience that changed their lives. For him it was at age 9 when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Listening to “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” he decided he wanted to play the guitar. His parents supported him and he started playing in bands, moving on to hard rock, like Led Zeppelin. At a rehearsal in his basement when he was 16, his dad (whose motive was not discussed) suggested to him, “Try classical guitar.” He did, and it stuck. He found it demanded more thought as to how he approached the music. The learning was more rigorous, and the mechanics of finger movements took more understanding. And, importantly, there was no need to lug around amps and sound systems.
When it came time for college, he discovered there weren’t that many schools offering a degree in music. He started at Muskingum, a tiny liberal arts college in Ohio, where he majored in elementary education but where he could take classical music lessons. His sophomore year he transferred to the Hartt School in Connecticut, part of the University of Hartford, from which he graduated with a degree rare at the time—a bachelor’s of music in classical guitar performance. He said he likes to reflect on his outlandish choice to play classical guitar for a living, despite its greater difficulty in achieving a professional level of playing and its fewer opportunities for collaboration, and how it gave him the chance for travel and artistic enrichment that he would otherwise not have had.
For the decade of the 1980s, McLellan toured with a fellow classical guitarist, Neil Anderson. They arranged together and played at thousands of events across the United States. They had concerts in South America and Europe, and they had two grand tours in Great Britain. All that time he was working as a software engineer at EMC, now part of Dell. He drew a parallel between the mental processes used for finding solutions for bugs in a software program and working out a quirk in his fingerwork in a piece of music.
By 1989 he had two kids and he realized he needed more time to spend with his family. The final push may have been when, in Geneva for a competition, a plane mix-up separated him from the seven-string guitar (more unusual than a six-string and in this case matching the one Anderson had) he needed for the imminent concert. A call home to his wife, dealing with an 18-month-old and a baby on the way, put his problem in perspective and made him feel really guilty. His last tour was that year.
“I cut off my fingernails and didn’t play for six years,” he said, prompting a display of his acrylic nails, custom made for plucking strings. He recalled the first time he wore an acrylic nail. It was 1985 at a performance with Anderson in Boston’s Jordan Hall. Toward the end of the last song before intermission, his middle finger’s nail flew off. He carried on; it was a fast piece, and he didn’t think anyone noticed. During intermission Anderson gave him a fake nail, the first time he had ever played with one. He has relied on acrylic nails for the past 20 years as his real nails started to fail him, becoming soft and easily cracked.
‘Concert In Your Living Room’
After a six-year hiatus he went back to his music and had to relearn what he had known and start learning new pieces. In 1998, for an auction at his local church in Sudbury, he donated a “Concert In Your Living Room” to the winning bidder. Soon that became two concerts, and then concerts for other organizations’ auctions or other fundraising events. The pro bono concerts are for 10 to 40 people, where the money goes to a selected charity. Some of the beneficiaries are Habitat for Humanity, Leukemia Lymphoma Society of New England, Pan-Mass Challenge, and Greater Boston Food Bank. One of the lesser known charities is Blue Dragon, which rescues and supports street kids in Vietnam. He likes best those engagements where rather than one host donor, there are many donors in the audience to better support “the good things in life.” McLellan comes by his charitable giving naturally—he calls his mother, who played piano, though not for a career, a pathological philanthropist; “She just couldn’t say no.” He said he is more selective.
McLellan took early retirement from EMC in 2015 and moved to Harvard a year later. He started subbing for music classes at Hildreth Elementary School and Bromfield School and helping with the middle school jazz program. Since 2017 he has been working with Hunt in the concert band program. In addition to his ongoing solo concerts for charity, his appearances with symphony orchestras, and his volunteering at Bromfield at least twice a week, McLellan teaches six hours a week at the Performing Arts Center in Framingham; he serves on its board and that of the Boston Classical Guitar Society.
The audience on Jan. 28 can be assured of one thing—Dave McLellan will have spent hours practicing for the concert. “I can’t not do it,” he said. He showed the Press a composition book in which he records his daily activities. He budgets certain time slots every day for practicing particular movements and pieces or for correcting “minor quirks” in finger movements. He explained that while he may know the mechanics of a piece, he has to practice to ensure a consistent level of professional quality and to be correct every time in conveying the intention of the composer. And he and Hunt have been rehearsing together twice a week in a corner of the Bromfield band room at the end of the school day.
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Harvard Cultural Council, a local agency that is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Pianist Nikolaus Hunt and guitarist Dave McLellan will perform a concert featuring the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco on Sunday, Jan. 28, at Fivesparks. (Photo by Thomas Kilian)
