The Next Classical Guitar Star is This Woman

Yale’s classical guitar concert on Sunday offered two hours of deeply technical, emotive music. But the best part of the show was actually deeply personal: It was my first time seeing Nora Spielman, my former guitar student, perform a jaw-dropping version of Sérgio Assad’s “Fantasia Carioca” (1988).

Yes, I was Nora’s first guitar teacher when she was 12!

And look at her now — slaying the nylon strings in the traditionally male-dominated world of guitar with some of the genre’s greatest instrumentalists. To say she’s disciplined is an understatement: Mastering these compositions with surgical precision takes hours, and even the slightest awry note resonates in an otherwise quiet concert hall.

Directed by Joao Luis Rezende, the Yale School of Music concert offered a dazzling, yet intimate, tribute to Assad, a renowned Brazilian composer and performer. Sunday’s lineup, featuring about a dozen young musicians, included intense performances of “Suite Brasileira No. 5.” (2015), “Eli’s Portrait,” and other compositions.

“Sergio Assad is one of my all-time favorite musicians,” Spielman, a Brooklyn native who now lives in Montana, tells Rockmommy. “If you listen to his live performances, recordings, arrangements, and compositions, he shows us a new world of music played on the guitar.”

And while Spielman was the only guitar-wielding woman to grace the music hall’s stage on Sunday, the rising classical-music star says she’s been showered by nothing but support from her peers.

“Being the only female guitarist in this concert was cool because I feel like I’m representing what women guitarists can do … it makes me very happy to say that because I know women from earlier generations in guitar cannot say that was their experience.”