This year, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet has attained two milestones: its 25th anniversary and its first Grammy Award. So how is it celebrating? By going on sabbatical.
"It seems almost ludicrous," founding member William Kanengiser said last week. "OK, we win a Grammy and then we take a year off. But it's actually playing out very nicely. People who have called for bookings have said, 'Oh, OK, we'll wait until March next year.' "
The quartet needed the break, Kanengiser said, because of pressures from constant touring.
"It came to a head about a year ago. I was concerned, actually. I wondered if the group was going to split up. But we came up with the solution: OK, if we take one year off, that will be enough for us to recharge our batteries, to do what we need to do, to cleanse and purify, as it were.
"But we wanted to go out with a sort of a bang. So we thought, 'Let's do a concert in L.A.' We didn't have any other dates booked here this year."
The upshot is that local audiences will have one more chance to see the ensemble before its hiatus, Friday at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.
Formed at USC in 1980 under the mentorship of guitarist Pepe Romero, it originally consisted of Kanengiser, Scott Tennant, John Dearman and Anisa Angarola, who left in 1989 to form her own -- as it turned out, short-lived -- group. Composer-guitarist Andrew York took her place. The others remained.
"I don't think any of us arrived thinking, 'I'm going to be a member of a good guitar ensemble,' " Kanengiser recalled. "We just came to learn at the feet of the master. We were enrolled in a class called Guitar Ensemble, it was required, and in a merely arbitrary way, the four of us were put together."
But they were soon on their way. In 1982, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs underwrote a tour by the four to schools in rural Mexico, where they played 48 concerts in five weeks.
"It was the ultimate baptism of fire, but it was such fantastic work," Kanengiser said. "I learned how to speak Spanish in five weeks, and we learned how to be an ensemble in five weeks."
They first called themselves the USC Guitar Quartet but changed the name in 1987 after they graduated and their professional career took off. They also went on to make 12 albums, the last of which, "Guitar Heroes," won them their Grammy for best classical crossover album.
