Compared to orchestral instruments, the classical guitar does not get a lot of attention.

The Juilliard School of Music, for example, did not even have a guitar instructor for its first 84 years. But that all changed in 1989, when Juilliard hired Sharon Isbin, the award-winning featured soloist with the Honolulu Symphony this weekend.

Isbin performs 60 to 100 concerts each season all over the world and has a long list of recordings, several of which have won Grammy awards. In fact, her reputation is beginning to resemble that of the great Andres Segovia.

"I had the honor of meeting (Segovia) in 1979," Isbin said during a pre-concert interview. "When I won the Queen Sofia Competition in Madrid, he heard my performance. He tracked me down and invited me to his home, and that was the beginning of a 20-year friendship."

The piece Isbin performed with the Symphony — Rodrigo's "Fantasia para un gentilhombre" (Fantasy for a Gentleman) — brought that friendship into the limelight, along with guitar lineage.

The "Fantasia" is based on old Spanish folk themes recorded in a 17th-century guitar instruction book by Gaspar Sanz, a guitar master. Rodrigo set those themes into a piece for Segovia, the Gentleman of the Guitar for his age, as Sanz had been for his.

Sounding like Segovia with her easy mastery, silken runs and ringing melodies, Isbin played with a similar immediacy, strumming her own meanings into what has become a guitar standard.

As usual with guitar concertos, Isbin's guitar was miked, but in the first movements, the amplification lent her top string an uncomfortably harsh tone. Fortunately, adjustments at the sound board eventually mellowed her highs into a more even mix.

Responding to the audience's enthusiastic reception of the Rodrigo, Isbin offered an encore of Francisco Tarrega's "Recuerdos de la Alhambra," a technical study that showcased Isbin's liquid tremolo supporting crystalline melodies and inner lines. It was spectacular.

Guest conductor JoAnn Falletta sounded immediately at home once again with the Honolulu Symphony, eliciting a richly cohesive sound, with powerful brass choirs and excellent string ensemble.

Falletta, who maintains a busy conducting schedule, explained that she likes to listen to an orchestra for quite a while at the first rehearsal: "I think it's important to let an orchestra talk to you first — musically, of course, not in words — and let them tell you who they are. It's very exciting to get to know an orchestra's personality."

She opened the concert with Kodaly's colorful "Dances of Marosszek," based on old Hungarian folk music from the Marosszek district of Transylvania. The highlight was a central slow dance with a series of pastoral solos — Brian Greene (oboe), Susan McGinn (flute), Julia Richter (piccolo), Ignace Jang (violin) and Kirby Nunez (string bass) — before the cellos and violas pulled in the full orchestra for the final two robust dances.

Falletta dedicated the second half of the concert to one of the monuments of the early 20th century, Sibelius' Symphony No.2.

"When I first studied Scandinavian music — Carl Nielsen, Sibelius — I found them very hard to understand," Falletta said. "Composers write in their own language; they have the cadence of their language in their ears. (Scandinavian music) is a combination of this bare, frigid landscape, but with an incredibly warm, passionate heart."

The Sibelius is a trickling together of themes from myriad springs, flowing into a grand confluence, a climax of anticipation. Over the course of four movements, which last about 45 minutes, snippets combine, mosaic-like, into larger and larger passages, building inexorably into a huge, magnificent and powerful final climax.

It is impossible not to be awed by its structure. Swept away by the music's grandeur, the audience closed the evening with a standing ovation.