Heitor Villa-Lobos Website

Globetrotting recording artist Julian Byzantine returning to Freeport for a benefit event
Sunday, 25 January 2009 15:41
Julian Byzantine...guitar man The Spanish guitar was immortalised in the best-selling song of international superstar Toni Braxton - and its versatility gets fully demonstrated next week in Freeport by one of the world's finest virtuosos in the instrument.

It is the centre part of an exciting night devoted to music and song from Spain and Latin America planned for the Regency Theatre - a show which includes the staccato rhythms of tango, the world's sexiest dance, as well as the smoother, more lyrical notes of classical numbers.

Globetrotting recording artist and concert performer Julian Byzantine will be stopping by on the way to an appearance in California to be the centrepiece of a benefit event in aid of the Freeport Players Guild Scholarship Fund. The British-born, Australian-based Byzantine has played in 76 countries in a glittering career which has seen him as soloist, teacher, and author of one of the most famous and authoritative books ever written about the instrument.

The orchestras he has played with and the venues he has appeared at read like a musical "Who's Who" and "What's What" with the Royal Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestras among the former and the Sydney Opera House and New York City's Carnegie Hall among the latter.

His appearance on Freeport's more modest Regency stage will be supported by a glittering array of local talent some of whom have benefited in the past from the fund for which the event, on Friday, February 6, at 7 pm, will be raising much needed funds.

They will include pupils from the Lois Seiler Academy of Dance; the Orchestral School of Music and the Allegro School of Music string ensemble.

The tango, Por Una Cabeza, will be played by Afrika Karamo (violin) and Eva Ratuszynski (viola), Lois Desaulniers (piano). Dalia Feldman will be singing from the works of Heitor Villa Lobos, the Brazilian composer recognised as the most significant Latin American composer of all time.

It will be an apt choice since the star of the evening, Byzantine, owed his early fame to a TV documentary on Villa Lobos which he presented and which was subsequently broadcast on screens around the world. By then he had already shown his personal prowess on the guitar and attracted the attention of outstanding Spanish musician Andres Segovia and his pupil Venezuelan Alirio Diaz, both of whom took him under their wings.

It will be Byzantine's second appearance in Freeport but his focus on a range of Hispanic music will ensure a programme which will on one hand be entirely different in content and style and on the other world class.

"It is rare if ever that a community with a population as small as that of Grand Bahama can have attracted such a genuinely famous and remarkable performer," says producer Gloria McGlone.

Tickets at $35 each can be bought at The Seventeen Shop, Downtown; Island Java, Port Lucaya and the Italian Specialty Shop, Seahorse Plaza.