Polish guitarist Marcin Dylla gave a brilliant, deeply poetic recital, sponsored by the Omni Foundation, Saturday at the War Memorial Green Room. Dylla captivated a large, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable audience with sensuous tone, rhythmic flexibility, and deeply felt emotion in a program of conservative 20th-century works enlivened by a modern masterpiece and a 19th-century Caprice.
The evening began with Manuel Ponce’s Sonata Romantica (Hommage à Schubert), in the composer’s original version, rather than in the more familiar edition published by the work’s dedicatee, Andrés Segovia. In four movements lasting more than 20 minutes, it is the longest and most difficult of Ponce’s sonatas, yet Dylla played with ease and an emotional suppleness reminiscent of Schubert’s own works.
The first movement, Allegro non troppo, semplice, featured two contrasting themes and a mercurial development. The second, Andante, was a touching melody of delicate beauty. Moment musical vivo, the third movement, contrasted dramatic and fervently played outer sections with a gentle and solicitous middle section. The finale, Allegro non troppo e serioso, evoked the fascination of early romantics with emotions both dark and childlike. Throughout it all Dylla consistently charmed the audience with his beautiful sound, supple rhythm, and bravura virtuosity.
A master of orchestral color, the modernist Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu was also an amateur guitarist who told Julian Bream it was the instrument he most loved. Influenced by Debussy as well as by the delicate, flexible gestures found in the music of Asia, his music uses rhythmic freedom to create a feeling of great spaciousness in a short time span. Dylla gave an exquisitely sensitive rendition of Takemitsu’s In the Woods, with refined use of rubato and a wide range of color and articulation. The first movement, “Wainscott Pond,” a meditation on a picturesque lake in the New York region of the Hamptons, opens with a melody evocative of Henze. “Muir Woods,” an homage to the ancient redwoods in Northern California, used harmonics to create the image of a deep forest dappled with splashes of light. The whole was suffused with an impressionistic harmony that brought to mind the Preludes of Debussy.
Capricious Turn
Giulio Regondi was a 19th-century prodigy admired by Nicolo Paganini and Fernando Sor. His Introduction and Caprice, Op. 23, is a tour de force with capricious mood and fiendish ornamentations that Dylla considers an excellent introduction to Alexandre Tansman’s more introspective Variations on a Theme of Scriabin. The pair of works certainly offered a vivid contrast. Dylla gave Tansman’s quiet neoclassical score a profoundly moving interpretation.
Dylla ended both sections of his program with the music of Joaquín Rodrigo, a blind composer who died in 1999, who drew on many different aspects of his country’s spirit as sources of inspiration. Junto al Generalife, a portrait of the gardens outside the ancient Moorish Alhambra, presents an elegiac echo of flamenco. Rodrigo wrote: “There can be found the gentle rustle of perfumed breezes, a distant tinkle of bells, and flowers which shelter behind the myrtle bushes. And there, also, the guitar reposes and dreams.”
Zarabanda lejana is Rodrigo’s homage to the Spanish vihuelist Luys Milan, while Entre olivares is a boisterous peasant dance. In Tres Piezas españolas the “Fandango” is a portrait of an 18th-century Spanish dance, the “Passacaglia” a serious work with a depth and virtuosity comparable to the Chaconne of Bach, and “Zapateado” an evocation of a vigorous, rhythmically complex flamenco dance. Dylla handled all this music with an unusual combination of technical bravura and musical sensitivity, thrilling the large and enthusiastic audience. A cheering standing ovation was rewarded with an encore of a “Vals Lento” from Valses Poeticos, by Enrique Granados.