Recovered from a career-threatening injury, Miloš Karadaglic has his sights set on two goals: finding the next great classical guitar concerto, and erasing the taboo of injuries among musicians.

Transcript

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Pop music has a whole lot of hits where guitar is the star, but in the classical music world, there aren't many concertos that make the six-string the centerpiece. A guitarist named Milos is hoping to change that. Tim Greiving has the story.

TIM GREIVING, BYLINE: Milos Karadaglic was 8 when he noticed the dusty guitar sitting on a shelf in his house in Montenegro.

MILOS KARADAGLIC: I think my father had this guitar when he was young and when he tried to seduce my mother. And once he got her, I don't think he played it ever again - typical sort of behavior. I got this guitar, and seriously, the moment I held it in my hands, I felt I found my best friend.

GREIVING: Pretty quickly, he discovered he could be a classical guitar player. And that journey took him out of the Balkans to the Royal Academy of Music in London. Before long, Milos, who just goes by his first name, was signed to a prestigious record label and playing major concerts, from the Royal Albert Hall to the Hollywood Bowl. He was typically booked to play the most famous concerto for guitar and orchestra, the "Aranjuez" by Joaquin Rodrigo.

(SOUNDBITE OF MILOS KARADAGLIC PERFORMANCE OF JOAQUIN RODRIGO'S "CONCIERTO DE ARANJUEZ")

GREIVING: The only problem was there are no other famous guitar concertos.

KARADAGLIC: Classical guitar, unfortunately, doesn't have as long of a tradition in terms of repertoire as a violin, cello or piano. I would meet with conductors and promoters. You would say, OK, what are we doing next? And there wouldn't be so many things that they would be excited about.

GREIVING: Milos made it his mission to fix that, and he started talking to composers whose mainstream reputation might do the trick. He told Joby Talbot, the British concert and film composer, that he wanted something grand. Talbot responded with "Ink Dark Moon."

(SOUNDBITE OF MILOS KARADAGLIC PERFORMANCE OF JOBY TALBOT'S "INK DARK MOON")

GREIVING: The other composer Milos set his sights on was the man who brought Middle Earth to life. He felt composer Howard Shore could bring some of that "Lord Of The Rings" magic into the concert hall.

(SOUNDBITE OF MILOS KARADAGLIC PERFORMANCE OF HOWARD SHORE'S "THE FOREST: I")

HOWARD SHORE: I named the piece "The Forest" because I wrote it in a forest.

GREIVING: Shore even included a little quote of the famous Rodrigo concerto.

SHORE: By the time I got to the third movement and I'd been working on it for almost about nine months, I realized I wanted to pay a little debt of gratitude to the works that I've heard and that I love.

(SOUNDBITE OF MILOS KARADAGLIC PERFORMANCE OF HOWARD SHORE'S "THE FOREST: II")

KARADAGLIC: It's like his hat off to the great master who gave the greatest guitar concerto of the 20th century. But like now, let's hope that we discover and premier the "Aranjuez" for the 21st century. If there is one great wish in my whole career, it will be to do exactly that.

GREIVING: Milos' career was actually in jeopardy while those commissions were going on. Around 2016, when he was playing 120 concerts a year and recording albums in between, he developed a serious hand injury. It was diagnosed as a muscle disorder, although he emerged from his year of cancelled concerts, treatment and reflection believing it was simply physical and psychological burnout.

KARADAGLIC: No doctor in this world understands how you make music, how you make something so godly with your 10 fingers and your six strings or your piano or your violin or whatever you're doing. And it's impossible to understand that and to control that and to miraculously fix that with an injection or with this or with that or the other.

GREIVING: The whole experience gave Milos a new mission to go along with finding the next great guitar concerto - erasing the taboo of injury for classical musicians.

KARADAGLIC: I wanted to talk about it because I feel that too many of my colleagues suffered the same thing and were not able to find the support that they need and were not able to go onto the right path with treatment and with help.

GREIVING: For NPR News, I'm Tim Greiving.

(SOUNDBITE OF MILOS KARADAGLIC PERFORMANCE OF HOWARD SHORE'S "THE FOREST: II") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Tags: Genre: Classical