This is the first post in the Play Out series, a collection of profiles on performers, ensembles, and organizations who have chosen non-traditional approaches to classical music performance.
In 2010, Fabricio Mattos cut off his nails – which to a guitarist means ending one’s career. He was living in Italy at the time and had just left a competition where “they did something really bad to me.” (I did not ask him to elaborate.) He was upset, destroyed. Upon returning home, he opened a drawer and found two pieces that had been written for him. Deciding that he could not let the composers down – he couldn’t quit just yet – he instead got to work.
First, Fabricio brainstormed a list of everything he had been told guitarists need to do to build career in music. This included participating in competitions and avoiding performing contemporary music for general audiences. He decided to break every one of these rules and find his own route to a performance career. “I started creating new normals,” he explained to me over the din in the basement canteen at the Royal Academy of Music, where he is now pursuing a PhD. With his new set of guidelines, he was determined to prioritize collaboration over competition, play “hardcore” new music from many styles and backgrounds, organize his own world tours, and prove that guitar concerts are not always greeted with vacant halls and empty seats.
Growing up in Brazil, Fabricio did not start learning guitar until he was 13. But from the age of 4, he was already performing tambourine and later percussion with his dad’s Carnival band. “My lessons were onstage,” he explained. If he became distracted or cocky, his dad, playing saxophone next to him, would slap the back of Fabricio’s head - at the parties it was too loud to talk. “When I felt that on my head, I knew that I had to hear the foot drum to go into the rhythm again, because I was out. So that was the kind of education I had in music.”
When he finally did start guitar, his musical training was not restricted to a single genre – a broad approach that is common for Brazilian guitar pupils. He observed, “I only felt the real division between classical and popular when I came to England.” Crossing and blending genres within a single performance is ubiquitous in Fabricio’s creative work to this day; rather than confining himself within a particular cannon, he instead uses a concept or theme as a guiding principle. For example, in the project The Colours of Eden, each of three distinct concert programs tells a narrative of a fictional woman’s life, and the music used in that narrative can range from Brazilian traditional to German song, with a bit of Freddie Mercury and Benjamin Britten thrown in there (because why not?).
The Colours of Eden, a collaborative project with singer Georgia Knower, references the Indian classical dance form Kathakali. Inspired by the art form’s density of conceptual material, all contained within the space of a bedsheet on the floor, Fabricio and Georgia’s storytelling is staged upon a colored sheet. The colors reference the characters they have created: Red Velvet (the woman who is betrayed), White Silk (the one who tries to grow up too quickly) and Black Leather (who loses everything, including eventually her sanity). Though Georgia initially moved to different positions on the sheet to designate which character in a narrative she was embodying – the woman protagonist, her lover, or a narrator – more recently, she has been studying the Kathakali eye gestures and, according to Fabricio, is now effective at using these alone to demarcate transitions between characters. Other choreography remains in use, including a lipstick-aided murder scene.
But Colours is only one of Fabricio’s active projects. Perhaps the most ambitious is Worldwide Guitar Connections (WGC), a "global collaborative project" that Fabricio founded in 2011 and which has just finished its third season. The first was in the immediate aftermath of his pivotal Italy experience. As his nails were growing back, he couldn’t practice, so instead he spent several months coordinating with composers, producers, and designers around the world – in 25 countries, to be precise. When his nails reappeared, he only practiced the new pieces that the five composers had written for the project, which is nicely symbolic. It would be impossible to fully describe even everything Fabricio shared about these huge WGC undertakings, but the following highlights stuck out to me.
- Fabricio came up with the idea of asking audience members to write notes on the back of their programs before returning them, a concept he has dubbed “Reprogram!” This has saved on printing costs and also allowed people from different places to share messages and connect with one another across time and space.
- On the second tour, he performed a 25-minute piece about the Divine Comedy, which he interspersed with the other compositions and some recitations from Dante's text, playing it from a different position onstage and with different lighting than the other pieces to create a “stage within the stage.”
- One of his concerts on the most recent tour was at the Antigo Cassino da URCA, an abandoned casino that had been mostly conquered by Rio jungle. He described how bats, rats, and ghosts darted through the space, establishing an intense atmosphere.
Though his explorations of performance practice began as a rejection of conservative classical music institutions and alienating professional trajectories, Fabricio’s primary reason for continuing this line of work boils down to one word: collaboration. Competition, he says, “creates division where division didn’t need to exist,” and may not be as necessary as many people claim. In his own words, there's "a reframing that needs to happen very soon for the survival and relevance of our profession.”
All photos provided by Fabricio Mattos, used with permission.