South Bay Guitar Society - Guitar Virtuoso Alan Mearns with a Prelude performance by Meezahn Kemal
Sat, Nov 02
|St. Francis Episcopal Church
Known for years for performances of his original art songs, Alan Mearns more recently gained recognition for his inspiring transcriptions of core classical guitar repertoire. Weaving intricate internal voices and harmonies into the original scores, Mearns performs them with extraordinary skill


Time & Location
Nov 02, 2024, 7:00 PM
St. Francis Episcopal Church, 1205 Pine Ave, San Jose, CA 95125, USA
About The Event
Guitar virtuoso René Izquierdo says of Mearns, “If you think you’ve heard Bach on the guitar, think again!” Likewise, Mark Delpriora of The Juilliard School adds that while Godowsky, Busoni, Leonhardt, and others produced widely performed Bach transcriptions, the music world should recognize Bach-Mearns, “for no transcription of Bach deserves a hyphen more than Mearns’s guitar transcriptions.”
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Alan Mearns began musical studies on the violin at age five, switching to the guitar at ten. After moving to the U.S. in his late teens, Mearns studied guitar with Douglas James at Appalachian State University under the prestigious Fletcher Scholarship and with Stanley Yates at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn.
Mearns’s November 2 performance marks his South Bay Guitar Society debut, an event that guitar enthusiasts will not want to miss. For a preview of Mearns’s inventive rendering of Bach, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp98MRKrs2U
Prelude performer Meezahn…