Pairing guitar with voice at Desert Song Festival

When you think of art songs, the first image to pop up is of a piano and a singer.

Julia Pernet would love to dispel that.

She wants to paint another picture in your mind: guitar and vocalist.

“We’re so used to thinking of art song with piano, but if you look back, guitars or lutes were everywhere, and lute in song was natural,” she explained. “So it’s really kind of gotten lost in the thought process, but they are beautiful together. The scale of voice and guitar are so alike. I think it’s an interesting thing.”

Guitarist David Leisner couldn’t agree more.

“It’s a very exciting combination,” Leisner, 61, said from home in New York last week. “The repertoire for voice and guitar is enormous and very high quality.

“I think (art songs) are the most intimate and powerful experiences. When you turn to voice and guitar, it then becomes even more intimate and can be a very, very soulful experience,” he added.

Leisner will demonstrate his point in a recital Thursday with critically acclaimed tenor Rufus Müller as part of the Tucson Desert Song Festival. It will be only the pair’s second performance together, coming more than a year after their first in New York’s Symphony Space, performing a recital of Benjamin Britten’s works for voice and guitar.

The New York Times gave the pair a flattering review, saying the two “proved exemplary, characterful collaborators throughout” and praised both for their individual musicianship.

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At their Tucson performance, part of the third annual Tucson Desert Song Festival, Leisner and Müller will explore classical works by Schubert, Manual de Falla’s “Seven Popular Spanish Songs,” works from that New York Britten concert and Leisner’s self-penned “West Wind,” a six-song cycle set to the words of American nature poet Mary Oliver.

He said this will be the first time he will perform “West Wind” in the West.

Leisner, 61, is a regular on Tucson stages dating back to the early 1980s. But this will be Müller’s first time here.

“We have hit it off very nicely,” Leisner said. “I think we see eye to eye musically on so many things.”

Leisner also will get a chance to play solo, including performing “Elige” by early Romantic composer Johann Mertz and the six-minute slow movement of Italian-American composer David del Tredici’s “Facts of Life,” a four-movement work described as a symphony for guitar. Leisner commissioned the piece from del Tredici in 2009 and recorded it on an album of the same name due out in February.

“David’s music is very obsessive, and this is extraordinarily lyrical and nostalgic and almost sweet,” Leisner said. “It’s quite different from the rest of the piece, which is very gritty and dramatic.”

“This is a very big deal not only for me but for the guitar world,” he added. “It’s a huge piece and probably the longest by an important composer. It’s not only long but it’s really great music. Truly it’s a masterpiece, and this movement is a great introduction to the piece.”

The Tucson Guitar Society has been part of the Tucson Desert Song Festival since its inaugural event in 2013. Pernet said she already has plans in place for the 2016 event. The society will once again team up with Ballet Tucson — the groups collaborated along with the now-defunct Chamber Music Plus Southwest in an event at the first festival — to perform a flamenco-flavored concert with the critically acclaimed flamenco guitarist Adam del Monte.