BBC CULTURE FEATURES THE GREAT KAT IN "THE NEED FOR SPEED: MUSIC'S FASTEST AND MOST FURIOUS"!

Rainer Hersch, BBC Culture

BBC - Culture - The need for speed Music’s fastest and most furious

 

By Rainer Hersch

29 June 2015

Born in England, raised in New York, Juilliard graduate the Great Kat is a guitarist on a mission – to play pieces of classical music fast. Very fast. And that’s not the only thing she takes at a lick.

“I am the only violin virtuoso… who applies the Paganini technique: perpendicular fingers placed on the guitar,” she shouts at me down the phone with the rapidity of someone whose battery is about to go but who has to get one final message across or lives will be lost. The high-octane guitar shredder is known for her thrash metal interpretations of well-known classical compositions; she can play the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in one minute and 14 seconds.

“My technique is like Heifetz on guitar, that’s what the Great Kat is doing fastest, and resurrecting classical music,” she says, at speed. “That’s the point of classical music – to energise. The YouTube generation has about 10 seconds to wake up.”

Can this be true? Unless we liven things up, is classical music heading for death at the hands of a generation with the attention span of a forgetful gnat? In my new programme Fast and Furioso, I attempt to find out.