interviews Young Guitarist Series: ADAM KHAN
Interviewed by THERESE WASSILY SABA
Classical Guitar magazine
ADAM KHAN is a guitarist from Wales. He has played in festivals all over Britain and at the Bucharest Festival, toured India, Pakistan and the Gulf, played for BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Kent, and has performed works by Castelnuovo Tedesco, Vivaldi and Malcolm Arnold's Serenade for Strings with the Allegri String Quartet. He regularly does session work which recently included recording a film sound track with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with music by Mark Thomas.
He began the guitar at the age of eleven. "My first lessons on the guitar were in Neath, Wales, with Bert Veale. I used to have the lessons in his shop -- the Neath Music Shop. I'm quite sure that's where I got the urge to perform. It wasn't even like a lesson because he'd be serving on the counter, and you'd get all these customers watching you playing. I'm sure it helped me later on in auditions, because I always associated the guitar with lots of people watching."
"I only studied with him for about two years, then I went to Christ's College, a boarding school in Brecon, Wales. It had a pretty good music department. They used to give us two hours a day to practise. We used to do a concert about every two weeks: we'd play lunchtime concerts at different boarding schools."
"Then I had to get a proper teacher, and Ray Burley was the man who was recommended to me. I've been with him on and off ever since. He's basically the one who has helped me the most in studying and improving my playing."
Adam Khan sat for performance diploma exams for two different examination boards. "I did all the grade exams, and when I was still at school I did two performance diplomas: one for Trinity, the LTCL, and one for the Associated Board because it was the challenge. I did my music A-level at school as well. After that I got the chance to go to music college but I just couldn't decide whether I wanted to go or not. I was working in a bar in Swansea and I was studying with Ray, thinking maybe next year I'd go to college. There were two ways of looking at it: there were the positives of going and meeting all the musicians and being in that environment, and the other side was that I already had the LTCL and even though you learn an awful lot more, at the end of the course you get a similar qualification to what I had. So I chatted to a few people like Gareth Walters and Ray, and they all said, if you start now just doing small concerts and gradually getting a name for yourself, you'll be one step ahead, even though you won't have a lot of the same contacts that a lot of people have from college."
"So I thought I would keep having lessons with Ray, and then I got these chances to go on a course with Leo Bronwer at the Santo Tirso Guitar Festival in Portugal and in Germany. He was really nice to me. I worked on his repertoire and on a lot of baroque music with him. At the time I was playing things, a lot of his Cuban folk-influenced pieces and then a lot of the real contemporary, avant-garde pieces like Parabola and La Espiral Eterna. At one stage I was playing Parabola, Canticum, La Espiral Eterna and Cuban Landscape with Bells all in one concert, which was probably a bit much. If you're playing someone like Bronwer, you can really go through his whole process. You can start with something like the Suite in D that he wrote when he was 15 or 16, and then you can move through his different compositional phases right up to the Sonata and that really difficult piece that he wrote just after that, Ritos de la Orishas. Brouwer was really helpful in enthusing me and building my confidence in playing."
"He did help me with some left-hand techniques, to do with different ideas that he has for moving the whole hand; what we quite often learn is to move the fingers and keep the hands fixed almost; he's much more into this idea of moving the whole hand at the same time."
"The other international player who helped me with technique was Roberto Aussel. I went to quite a few classes with him and he helped me mainly with my right-hand technique; just working on different studies to increase strength in the right hand. He advocates a lot of Villa-Lobos studies, Gialiani studies to keep the hand ticking over and some Argentinean folk music as well that he thinks help with the right hand, because there is so much going on, in the accompaniment and the tune. He has a huge repertoire of Argentinean folk songs."
Although Adam Khan seems to have achieved a lot for such a young guitarist, he says he likes things to go gradually. "I think it's very much a gradual process, especially in classical music. I don't think there's any need to go charging around trying to play the biggest venues, all within a short space of time, because we're not like pop stars who have to do it while they're really young. For me it's a long career. I've seen guitarists who have burst onto the scene, and then within two years they've gone. A lot of it must be from doing too much too soon, and being pushed too hard too quickly. Then before you know it, you're doing so much or you're at a level that you're not used to and it's hard to make up the ground between the two, and the experience is what you've missed, so I'd rather come up slowly."
Adam Khan was a finalist in the Simone Salamaso competition in Italy in 1996, and in 1997 he was selected for the finals of the Stotsenberg Competition in Malibu. "I've got five or six prizes now in competitions; I've not come first, I've come second and got the special prizes. They have been real confidence builders because I've gone there and realised that I can hold my own against the young European players coming through. I wanted to get used to that environment, and learn what they're looking for, and how to approach the situation. So I'm looking over the next year or two to do some of the bigger ones. I learned a lot from competitions like the Stotsenberg -- some great players went through there, people like Franco Platino who went on to the GFA, and Adam del Monte. These were all in a different league: they all knew how to compete, they knew the right repertoire, and the right way to do it. It's a really good thing, if you do get knocked out of a competition, to just stick around and listen, however painful it is."
"1998 was the first time that I went over to India. I met someone at a concert here who was from the Calcutta School of Music. He helped me organise a tour. I did something like twelve concerts the first time. The concerts were the same as here, formality-wise, but the audiences were five times the size that they are here. I was playing to 400-600 people in beautiful halls and they had a huge knowledge of the repertoire. People came up before concerts asking me if I'd play a certain piece by Sor for them, and people came up at the end with tattered copies of Brouwer's music and asked how I played certain bits. It was amazing because I didn't think that there'd be that much knowledge of the classical guitar, but I wasn't the first guitarist to play concerts there by a long stretch."
Is the Middle Eastern and Indian concert touring going to be a part of his life for years to come? "Yes. I wanted to go out there and see these places because my family's from the north of Pakistan originally. We had our own kingdom there up until 1957. My real title is Prince Adam Khan of Hunza, but the kingdom has now become part of Pakistan. I don't mean this arrogantly, but I think it was nice for the people out there who are studying guitar, to see an Asian person actually doing it as a living, because they're just used to seeing classical music as a very European dominated field. So I definitely had a good rapport with them, because I was, in a sense, one of their own. Playing in Pakistan was not as much fun as India because there isn't the knowledge of Western music there, but it was a big deal that a member of this royal family was coming out and doing concerts. Also I did do some collaborations playing Pakistani folk songs with a sitar player, Nafees Ahmet, and a tabla player, Shubir Hussein. They are very well-known artists out there, so we played in a cricket stadium to about 7000 people. I also got a chance to play solo, so I was playing some Maximo Diego Pujol to 7000 Pakistanis. Quite a strange experience."
Being a very versatile player Adam Khan regularly does session work: "I remember the first sessions I did; I was really quite young. You're sight reading is really not quite up to it, especially when they throw you these complex rhythms with a backing orchestra playing and you can't see where it fits in. As you do it more and more, you become a lot more confident. Now I feel I wouldn't be fazed by anything in a recording studio session, from a lot of different genres of music. Nerves hold you up a lot in those places, when you start out, if someone gives you a piece of music that's very difficult; you'd say: "OK", whereas now I would just laugh and say: "I can't do this now, just give me three hours". Because you know that you're a good player, and if you can't play it, then probably no one else can either."
Adam Khan will give the opening concert at the Craig-y-Nos Opera Theatre in mid-Wales on 6 July 2001 at 8pm. The theatre was built by the famous Italian singer Adelina Patti in the late 1800s. It is an exact copy in miniature of her favourite theatre in Italy. It was out of use for a few years, but has now reopened.
In November and December of last year Adam Khan gave some concerts in India and Pakistan for 'SOS Villages' -- a children's charity. He is planning to return to Asia later this year for some more concerts.
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