From performing in London, New York, Frankfurt, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, classical guitarist Scott Kritzer celebrates fifty years of playing the guitar with a rare Portland appearance in a retrospective concert to benefit the Portland Guitar Society’s Advani Fund on Friday, December 19th, 2014, 8:00 PM at the Community Music Center located at 3350 SE Francis in Portland, Oregon.
Advanced tickets are $15, available at https://scottkritzerconcert.eventbrite.com. Tickets will also be available at the door for $20. All tickets are for general admission.
After making his own instrument from a cigar box, a piece of pine and rubber bands, his parents 
decided a guitar would be a good Christmas gift. That was in 1964. “The instrument has never really left my hands,” he says. Over the decades following, Kritzer has established himself as one of America’s top classical guitarists with a lineage to the great Andres Segovia. One of Kritzer’s main teachers was a favorite Segovia protege Michael Lorimer. “I am so fortunate to have worked with so many great teachers, especially with Michael. In fact, after a thirty-year hiatus I began working with him again prior to making my recording Romance for Guitar. I also feel fortunate to have been able to sustain a career playing the guitar, and I thought it appropriate to give back to the guitar community.”
Kritzer’s December 19th concert will benefit the Portland Guitar Society’s Advani Fund. The late Gulu Advani was a former student of Mr. Kritzer’s and an active member of the Portland Guitar Society. The PGS established the fund in his memory in 1991 with the intent to help serious students of the guitar who have financial need to pursue their studies. Funds are available for lessons, master classes, sheet music or other expenses clearly related to guitar study.
Opening the program will be works featured on his upcoming all-baroque recording; three 
movements from a Sonata by baroque lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss. He will close the program with a set of works that opened his senior recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1980 from Manuel de Falla’s ballet The Three Cornered Hat. Also on the December 19th program are works reflecting Kritzer’s interest in working with vocalists, something he’s done nearly all his career. In between other works by Albeniz and Villa-Lobos, he will be performing his popular arrangement of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma and a premiere of his new arrangement Der Leiermann by Franz Schubert. Kritzer will also play a few Christmas carols from his A Classical Guitar Christmas CD.
Advanced tickets are $15, available at https://scottkritzerconcert.eventbrite.com. Tickets will also be available at the door for $20. All tickets are for general admission.
Arrive early and beginning at 7:45 you’ll be introduced to my student, the very talented 14 year old Michael Hermes, who will preview part of his upcoming Portland premiere slated for the spring of 2015.
