Washington County Free Library, Hagerstown MD

Free! Location: Community Room - 1 & 2 - 308/309 (Hagerstown)

For almost 30 years, guitarist and composer Michael DeLalla has been serving up a delicious brew of solo guitar compositions and arrangements of traditional tunes gathered worldwide, steeped with his classical training and seasoned with his jazz, Celtic and folk stylings. His fluency on classical, 12-string, and steel-string acoustic guitar showcases gifted improvisation and dazzling technical facility that never sacrifices the richness and poignancy of his compositions.

Michael characterizes his concert performance as a “journey” shared with his audience. While the music showcases his particular virtuosity his sometimes-wry, sometimes-poignant stories and observations of the experiences that are behind the pieces result is not just a collection of instrumental works but also a narrative of his travels and travails found in his varied musical habitats, from a capella kan e diskan in Breton Gaelic, to evocations of Japanese koto music and the North African o’ud, to tweaking the nose of the classical music world with his raucous “Piece for Steel Drum (If I Played Steel Drum)”.