Member Spotlight: Bruce Donehower

For this month’s CGC Academy Member Spotlight we’re featuring longtime member Bruce Donehower. Bruce was one of the earliest members of CGC and has been involved in so much of what’s been going on at CGC over the last several years. Below is a video of Bruce playing “Romanza” by Robert Schumann, arranged by Francisco Tárrega (sorry for the desync between the audio and video).

Bruce “retired” to the classical guitar in 2014 after his wife said he couldn’t bring a piano into the house and that if he wanted to do music he had to play guitar again. He quit playing classical guitar completely for a little more than 20 years prior to the return. Bruce found CGC at that time and connected with Simon. He participated in both Guitorberfests and the first CGC Summer School. His goals right now are to relearn the old repertoire that he once knew but forgot; to learn new pieces; and to learn to record and make better videos for friends and family. The Schumann piece is one that he worked on with Simon in 2017 at the CGC Summer School.

This transcription by Tárrega actually was quite difficult to track down because it is located in the middle of a longer piece (and was misprinted in earlier editions as having been from a different work by Schumann). This little romanza comes from Robert Schumann’s “Novelleten” (Op. 21) for solo piano and is found in two of the seven sections from No. 1 in F Major (this section appears twice in that piece: in the second section in F Major, and then again at the end in A Major, the key Tárrega uses for his transcription). Tárrega added the (quite appropriate!) title “Romanza.” Here’s a stunning performance of the whole piece by Claudio Arrau. – Dave Belcher