Advertisement
Guitar Virtuoso Alan Mearns in concertwith a Prelude performance by Meezahn Kemal
Now is your chance to hear an altogether new sensation in classical guitar. For a long
time, Alan Mearns was flying under the radar, writing and performing imaginative art
songs. Only recently did we discover that he was also creating entirely new and
inspiring transcriptions of classical guitar pieces. Mearns not only performs classical
pieces with extraordinary skill but weaves in intricate internal voices and harmonies not
in the original scores.
Rene Izquierdo, after listening to Mearns, declared “If you think you’ve heard Bach on
the guitar, think again!” Mark Delpriora of the Julliard School chimed in, saying that
whereas we have heard of transcriptions of Bach by Godowsky, Busoni, Leonhardt, and
others, we now can proclaim Bach-Mearns, “for no transcription of Bach deserves a
hyphen more than Mearns’s guitar transcriptions.”
Alan Mearns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He began his musical studies with
the classical violin at age five, switching to the guitar at age ten. Moving to the United
States in his late teens, he studied classical guitar performance with Douglas James at
Appalachian State University and with Stanley Yates at Austin Peay State University.
We are delighted to be hosting Alan Mearns’s debut performance with the South Bay
Guitar Society. This is a new classical guitar experience that you will not want to miss.
For a taste of Mearns’s inventive rendering of a Bach piece, listen to this clip:
We hope to see you at the concert on November 2 to enjoy this new marvel of guitar
performance.
Prelude performer Meezahn Kemal
John Dowland: My Lady Hunsdon's Allemande (Poulton 54)
Dušan Bogdanović: Secrets Nos. 3 and 7
J.K. Mertz: Nocturne Op. 4 No. 1
Meezahn Kemal, age 15, has performed in numerous recitals, including at the 2024 Summer Guitar Workshop at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied both solo and ensemble repertoire under David Tanenbaum, Marc Teicholz, and Meng Su. Meezahn has been a student for six years under Bradly Pupa at the California Conservatory of Music. Outside the guitar, Meezahn is a high-school sophomore in Redwood City and has sung in his school choir and been on his school’s cross-country and track teams.
Advertisement
Event Venue
St Francis Episcopal Church, 1205 Pine Ave, San Jose, CA 95125-3459, United States,San Jose, California
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.