Classical guitarist Eduardo Fernandez gave an excellent recital on Saturday evening, presented by San Francisco Performances and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, at the Marines’ Memorial Theatre. An internationally acclaimed performer for over 30 years, Fernandez presented an interesting, well-balanced program of mostly 20th-century music from Latin America and Western Europe, and finally thrilled us with a little-known masterpiece from Russia.
Born eight years after Beethoven, Fernando Sor was a member of the generation of composers schooled in the Classical era of music who were active in the transition to the Romantic era. His Fantasie No. 7, Op. 30, is an expansive work with a dramatic introduction, a theme and variations, and a finale that Fernandez handled with a tone alternately dark and brooding, or lively and sparkling as the music changed character
Abel Carlevaro and Gentil Montaña were both guitarist/composers active in the 20th century. Carlevaro was a protégé of Villa-Lobos and, like his mentor, was interested in merging the influences of Latin American and European music. His most successful pieces, the Preludios Americanos, have sources in the music of J.S. Bach, as well as composers in Spain, Italy, Argentina, and Brazil. Fernandez was well aware of all the sources, emphasized the characteristic rhythms of the various national dances, rendered Carlevaro’s modern counterpoint absolutely clear, and even created an impressionistic portrait of carnival in Montevideo. Montaña’s music is more purely folkloric, and Fernandez played it with heartfelt intensity and infectious joy.
Fernandez played with heartfelt intensity and infectious joy.
Carlos Chávez was a renowned composer, conductor, and educator whose distinctive, often highly percussive music synthesized elements of Mexican, Indian, and Spanish-Mexican influence. His Three Pieces for Guitar are written in an imaginary pre-Columbian style evoking the ancient past, with pentatonic scales and native American modes. Fernandez made the opening Largo a meditation on an imagined ancient song that, in the end, erupts into a frenzied dance. He presented the subsequent Tranquillo as another slow melody, which this time culminated in harplike arpeggios, and performed the final movement, Un poco mosso, as a whirling dance whose rapidly changing time signatures presented him with no difficulty.
Passionate Hungarian
A Hungarian of the same generation as Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, a composer named Johann Kaspar Mertz, was, like his contemporaries, interested in a more passionate and expressive approach to music, as well as to literary sources of inspiration. Mertz’s Bardenklänge are character pieces in the style of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, which Fernandez brought to life with a sensuous Romantic tone and expressive rubato.
Along with Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, Russian composer Edison Denisov was one of the best-known dissident composers of the late Soviet Union. His Sonata is ornately detailed and elaborate, and at the same time romantic and melancholy. Fernandez took our breath away as if on a roller coaster ride in Toccata, the dazzling first movement. In the second movement, Berceuse, he projected Slavic soul, and he both amazed and delighted in the final movement, Souvenir d’Espagne, which he referred to as “a vibrant and humorous portrait of a flamenco fiesta with a touch of Picasso.”
The audience leapt to its feet and cheered mightily, but the house lights came on before a surprised Fernandez was able to return for an encore. The Marines’ Memorial Theater is not as comfortable or beautiful as Herbst Theatre, and it seems the postconcert procedure needs some improvement.