The Strings Have It

The Guitar Foundation of America held its annual Convention and Competition in San Francisco this year and presented a week of fascinating concerts, lectures, master classes, and showcases of the work of celebrated luthiers and publishers, as well as this year's most important international classical guitar competition. Under the direction of Richard Patterson, the guiding force behind the Omni Foundation's series of guitar recitals often presented in association with San Francisco Performances, and David Tanenbaum, chair of the S.F. Conservatory of Music Guitar Department, the week gave an illuminating view of the breadth and depth of the current classical guitar world. There were an average of three concerts and four lectures on most days, an incredibly rich offering of appealing events. I've reviewed the high points of those I was able to attend. The mood of Tuesday's opening concert at the Conservatory was festive and the playing of Serbian guitarist Zoran Dukic was breathtaking. He began with Antonio José's Sonata, the most complex work written for guitar during the first half of the 20th century. Praised by Ravel as potentially "the greatest Spanish musician of our century," José was arrested and executed at age 34 in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, casting his music into an obscurity that has only recently been remedied.

José's Sonata is a composition requiring virtuosity, as well as great emotional depth and insight. In four distinct movements linked by recurring themes, and 20 minutes in length, the work offered Dukic many opportunities to captivate the audience with his sensuous tone, bravura playing, and superb sense of structure. On Wednesday morning at the War Memorial Building, composer Stephen Goss and guitarist Jonathan Leathwood presented a fascinating lecture on "Collaboration and Creativity." They dismissed the importance of an urtext, or original version of a score, and praised the many advantages of composer/performer partnerships in producing a finished composition. The talk was illustrated by Leathwood's performance of Goss's Oxen of the Sun, a composition for 10-string guitar and six-string guitar, to be played simultaneously by a single performer.

Leathwood held the 10-string instrument in standard playing position and laid the six-string instrument flat on a table immediately in front of him. He used the instruments to project a wide palette of unusual, and gorgeous, textures and colors. The title of the work is borrowed from James Joyce's Ulysses and the seven movements refer to episodes from Homer and Ovid. Three of the movements made beautiful variations on movements from Benjamin Britten's Six Metamorphoses after Ovid.

Blessed Sleep

Later in the day in Herbst Theatre the Chilean guitarist José Antonio Escobar gave a focused, meditative performance of Britten's Nocturnal. A set of variations on the theme of the ayre Come, Heavy Sleep by the great Renaissance composer and lutenist John Dowland, Nocturnal depicts various emotional states of the dream world in a series of variations. The burden of Dowland's ayre, that sleep is a blessed relief from the worries of the waking day, is dramatized by a series of variations, each based on motives from Dowland's song and each depicting a different mental state. Dowland's theme does not appear until the very end of the piece, where it synthesizes the fragments heard in the dream variations into a tranquil whole. Escobar captured the mostly disturbing moods of each variation, as well as the sublimely peaceful conclusion.

Friday night's concert highlighted the San Francisco Bay Area's rich 21st-century contributions to the guitar repertoire. David Tanenbaum deserves immense credit for creating a spellbinding evening of ensemble music, all written in the last few years for an instrument known for its conservative solo literature. The S.F. Conservatory Guitar Ensemble, with principal guitarist Marc Teicholz and Tanenbaum as conductor, gave a stylishly rhythmic U.S. premiere of Three Bresiliens in Saint Paul, by Sergio Assad, who will join the Conservatory guitar faculty this fall. Jorge Liderman, whose life ended tragically early this year, was commemorated by the violin and guitar ensemble Duo 46, with alternately fiery and plaintive selections from a work Liderman wrote for them, Aires de Sefarad, based on traditional Sephardic songs. Terry Riley and David Tanenbaum rocked the house with Riley's Moonshine Sonata written for Just Intonation National Steel Guitar, an instrument invented by Lou Harrison, and keyboards, which Riley tuned in just intonation. A heady concoction of Indian music, new music, jazz, and rock, the Moonshine Sonata was controversial. Its unusual tuning, amplification, and length disturbed those with conservative tastes. I found it an exciting contribution to the classical guitar world reminiscent of the best work of the new music group called Bang on a Can All-Stars. Riley was also represented by Y Bolanzero, a septet performed with force and precision by a group of international guitar world stars: Tanenbaum, Dukic, Gyan Riley, Marc Teicholz, Matt Gould, Alex de Grassi, and Ryan Brown.

Mercurial Awakenings

The most ambitious and deeply affecting work on the program was Aaron Jay Kernis' Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby, a song cycle for soprano, violin, guitar obbligato, and piano, which set four related texts. "The Salutation," by the English metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne, is a meditation on the rise of consciousness from nothingness. It begins with bell-like sounds in the piano and guitar and transforms these sounds throughout the movement. "The Light Gatherer," by the contemporary poet Carol Ann Duffy, is a beautiful realization of the delight in witnessing growth and change. The Double Lullaby is a gentle, lyrical song that intertwines the soprano and violin in settings of Humperdinck's "Evening Prayer" from Hansel and Gretel and the American spiritual "Angels Watching Over Me." The guitar and piano were often paired but, though Tanenbaum and Kernis always played with an exquisite sense of timing, the guitar was frequently overpowered. Soprano Anja Strauss followed the mercurial moods of the texts with great subtlety, and violinist Axel Strauss played the immensely difficult violin obbligato part with great ease and expressivity.

The week ended with the Guitar Foundation of America International Competition. The judges and audience agreed that Gabriel Bianco was the undisputed winner of the event. His Adagio from Bach's Third Violin Sonata was harmonically compelling and its simple two-note motive was used to build an intense, brooding structure, which served as a compelling introduction to the following Fuga. The fugue subject and chromatic countersubject were brought out with remarkable clarity, as was the shape of the overall structure. In an exciting evening, all the competitors played at an extremely high level. Otto Tolonen captured the spirit of Hans Werner Henze's Ariel, a quicksilver fantasy that depicts three episodes in The Tempest when that imprisoned spirit plays a harp. Austin Moorhead gave an utterly compelling account, alternately introspective and fiery, of Sergio Assad's Fantasia Carioca. Pablo Garibay gave an excellent performance of Antonio José's Sonata, the very work that also began this outstanding and memorable week of guitar music.