Our AGS 2025 - 2026 Concert Events

All AGS concerts are held at the Faith Lutheran Church, 7500 De Soto Ave in Canoga Park, CA 91303.

Our 2025 - 2026 concert series is now concluded and was deemed to be a smashing success by all.

We are now formulating our 2026 - 2027 line up of classical guitar concerts. This section will be updated as soon as we have the final agreements locked in.

The AGS William Kanengiser Concert

On May 9, a beautiful spring evening, members and friends of the American Guitar Society enjoyed a creative program of music performed by classical guitar virtuoso William Kanengiser.

Taking the stage, he said it was an honor to perform at the invitation of the society, due to its history as the oldest guitar society in the United States and the model for the rise of others. He then began his performance by playing Joaquin Turina’s Sevillana (Fantasia) which, fittingly, and chosen either by chance or intention, was composed in 1923, the year of the society’s founding.

This Turina piece, a song written in Spain for Segovia, was the beginning of a musical journey around the world. That journey continued with three Romanian peasant dances by Béla Bartók, followed by the first of two pieces commissioned for The Diaspora Project, a singular initiative of Kanengiser’s to expand repertoire. In it, he encourages original works evoking the lives and struggles of international migrants. Composers of these pieces take on the challenge of expressing the feelings of displaced peoples in the language of music.

In the first, Lost Land, Persian composer Golfam Khayam was inspired to voice in the tonalities and rhythms of traditional Persian music her feelings of disorientation when, after many years of living in the United States and Europe, she returned to her birthplace in Iran. The second piece, Reflections on the Dranyen, was inspired by composer Andrea Clearfield’s travels through Tibet, where she studied folk music played on the dranyen, a three-stringed instrument used in northern Himalayan areas.

Other pieces, all contemporary, reflected musical motifs of other nations. They included Léo Brower’s arrangements of two Cuban folk songs, Afro-Cuban Lullaby and Danza Characteristica; Ian Krouse’s DADGAD, inspired by an English folk song; Brian Head’s American-jazz-infused Brookland Boogie; and Dušan Bogdanović’s Three African Sketches, played by Kanengiser with staples placed across treble strings to suggest the rattling sound of the kora, a 21-string African instrument made from a gourd.

Throughout the evening, as Kanengiser spoke about his life, the pieces, and their composers, he established an easy rapport with the audience of guitar lovers. He played with passion and kinetic energy, his animated body language revealing inner emotions brought forth by the music. Moments of awe came with his masterly execution of difficult passages, when his fingers flew almost impossibly over the strings, creating rapturous tones and elegant dynamics ranging from powerful highs to subtle whispers.

As the evening ended, he received an extended standing ovation from a grateful audience. Well deserved!

John Steiner