Thibaut García, guitarist: “When I receive bad news, the guitar comforts me, it is my best friend”

Thibaut Garcia (Toulouse, 30 years old) fell in love with the guitar at the age of six. He remembers attending his first class and being captivated by this musical instrument and decided that it should be his inseparable companion on his journey through life. The young man is considered one of the greats promising contemporary guitarists and already has a discography that includes seven titles, including the most recent, Legends, which is a journey through Spanish popular music and a tribute to places in Spain and Argentina that he has visited and with which he has been captivated. García is in Mexico to participate in the Paax GNP Festival, an initiative created by director Alondra de la Parra to “build a cultural bridge” with international musicians who share their talent in Mexican territory, as the artist explained. The young guitarist does not stop in his rise in music and is full of projects. He currently works on calls Goldberg Variationsthe musical composition for piano written by the German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach in 1741, and for this he asked that two “twin” guitars be made, made from the same tree, to achieve a similar sound. His plan is to play them in “complete silence” in a monastery in France, but then he wants to repeat the experiment on a tour “around the world”. This week he has joined the Orquesta Imposible, the classical music project that de la Parra created during confinement, and participates under the baton of the director in several concerts that are part of the festival that takes place at the Hotel Xcaret Arte, on the shores of the Riviera Maya.

Ask. How did your passion for the guitar come about?

Answer. I come from a family where the guitar is always around. My parents are not professional musicians, but my father plays the guitar at a very good level and my mother knows the chords to sing. My parents came across guitars by singing French songs. I think it’s not an instrument that I really found, because I lived my whole life with it. When I was six I wanted to play it, to start seeing what it’s like, and I remember my first grade and I fell in love and that’s how the adventure began.

P. What did that first course give you?

R. It was something very simple. There was a teacher who explained to me what it was, learning some notes, some melodies, but the thing is that I am very curious to know what is after a note. When I had one page to practice, I would actually do two, three, four, five more during the week, to discover what they contained. Today I do that a lot, for example, I read new music to listen to something different, to make my brain very active.

Q. Who are your references, the composers you follow the most?

R. What is interesting with the guitar and its repertoire is that we have the heritage of the lute in baroque music. We have like 400 years of music, which is a lot and one lifetime is not enough to explore it all. We have Renaissance, baroque, romantic, modern, post-modern and contemporary music and composers like Bach. He never wrote for guitar, but he wrote for the lute and we also play the works for cello, violin and harpsichord. We also have Telemann and then the most famous Spaniards like Isaac Albéniz, who we are going to steal from his piano repertoire, Francisco Tárrega, Miguel Llobet, Antonio José and Manuel María Ponce, who is Mexican.

P. What do you feel when you play the guitar on stage?

R. The feeling is different if it is with an orchestra, if it is solo or if it is chamber music. When I am alone on stage that is my space, my zone. I have to create a contact with the audience and I love to talk a lot, explain things, tell stories and explain the works a little and also give people the keys to better listen to the repertoire. When I play with an orchestra it is more like a giant wave and you have to surf on that powerful wave that takes you very far. That is super interesting, because it is about having a connection with the conductor. And chamber music is like being with friends who have unity on stage. But when I play alone I really like that feeling of intimacy that you can create with the guitar, because the power of that guitar is that when you lower the sound people listen and there is a moment when you can feel that there is no noise, there is no breathing, everyone is silent. When you play an intimate instrument that is the magic that can happen.

P. And at that moment, on stage, what thoughts come to your head?

R. I think different things. Sometimes I have to think about the score to be very focused, to be in control, but I also think about freedom. What I like the most is to listen, to close my eyes or not, but not to look at anything. The best feeling is when you have your eyes open, but you don’t look at anything, everything is in your ear, listening. There is also a feeling that happens very rarely, I would say it happened to me like two or three times, and that is having the impression when you play that someone plays exactly the way you wanted. That is to say that we forget the entire technical side, everything happens through the imagination.

P. And have you ever been afraid of making a mistake?

R. It can happen, but I think it’s about hiding it. A journalist once told guitarist John Williams: ‘Mr. Williams, you are never wrong.’ And he replied: ‘Yes, at every concert, but you don’t see it.’ That’s exactly what happens: at every concert we make a little mistake, but you don’t have to see it, that’s our problem, not the audience’s.

Q. Do you save those mistakes in your memory to correct them later?

R. There are different kinds of mistakes. There are mistakes made in the moment because you took a risk and in that case magic or something bad can happen. Sometimes it is a concentration problem, memory problems, and you have to solve that very quickly. After the concert you already know where you have to work in the morning.

P. You have been named one of the great young promises of the guitar internationally, how do you receive this compliment?

R. I felt ready for big competitions and concerts quite early, but not in a hurry. What interests me is to propose to the public something that is interesting, with new ideas, and if I feel that I don’t have those ideas, I don’t do it. That’s why now I take much more time to prepare a project. Before, when I was younger, I could prepare a concert in a few days and it worked, but as artists what is incredible is to put yourself in a world that is different to imagine things and to imagine we need time, because you can’t have all the ideas in one day. Time is the best friend of artists to create something that is deep. I was working, for example, on a project about the music of Agustín Barrios, music for Paraguayan guitar, and for two years I thought ‘what can I propose that doesn’t exist about him’, works that people don’t know, arrangements that they don’t know; I was reading about the composer, discovering his life, because he had a phenomenal life, he changed his identity, he was a poet, a cartoonist, and all this needs time.

P. What mea
ning does the guitar have for you?

R. The guitar is my life, because I am 30 years old and I have been playing it for 23 years. I think I spend much more time with the guitar than with my friends and family. The guitar is my best friend. When I have bad news, something sad, I love to separate myself from everyone with my guitar and go play. I think it helps me, it makes me very happy, but it also consoles me. It is a very important relationship with the instrument, having the pleasure of working with the material, which is the sound. The sound is our identity, what we have in our head we make exist with the sound and that is something we have to practice every day.

Q. He is in Mexico to participate in the Paax GNP Festival concerts directed by Alondra de la Parra. What is it like to work with her?

R. She is someone who is very nice to work with. She is extremely talented. She is a person who has so many things to do, so many hours to play, but every time you are with her she is available, she is here in the moment with you making music. As a conductor she is super good, with a lot of energy. When you are a conductor it is very important not only to know the technique, but to know what you are transmitting, which is a musical idea, and she achieves it. You see in the faces of the musicians the energy she transmits to them.

P. Outside of your work with classical music, what type of music do you listen to?

R. I like a lot of things. I like discovering things, for example old French songs, but I also like discovering new artists. There are things in rap that I love. Two weeks ago I made a song with a rapper. I like it when the word is more important than the music, the magic of the word, and when there are people who, rather than saying words, live them. That is very powerful and can have a very strong impact on people.

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