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First Metropolitan United Church
February 16, 2013
Part way through a brilliant rendition of Albeniz's "Granada", I was struck by the thought: is "Granada" quintessential Spanish music because this is how Spanish music sounds, or because the piece has become something of a stereotype of Spanish music?
My answer tends to the latter, and in support of that position I offer Pepe Romero's programme as evidence. With the exception of an opening guitar quartet rendition of a Telemann concerto, all of the music played was written by Spanish composers...and while one wouldn't mistake some of the pieces as coming from anywhere else, they all sounded quite different from "Granada".
The concert opened with the Telemann concerto, played by the four guitarists. The concerto alternates slow-fast-slow-fast movements, and the packed house showed its appreciation by bursting into applause after the brisk Allegro second movement.
The remainder of the program consisted of solo, duet, and quartet renditions of music written for guitar and transcribed from piano works. The program was evenly split between the tried and true of classical guitar repertoire (including the aforementioned Granada and Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra which served both as an encore and a showcase for Romero's flawlessly smooth and even tremolo), and the unfamiliar.
The latter category included Rodrigo's Tonadilla para dos guitarras, rendered by Romero and Alexander Dunn. This piece is both idiomatically a guitar work and audibly more modern, with more advanced harmonies, than anything else on the programme. Also noteworthy was Romero's own composition for four guitars, Fiesta en Cadiz (Homenaje a Sabicas), with its strong flamenco influence.
The mood of the audience by evening's end was captured in a moment at the end of the first half of the concert. Romero, alone on the stage, played a rousing rendition of Turina's "Fantasia Sevillana Op.29", which eliciting a cry of "¡Ole!" from someone in the crowd. "¡Ole!" indeed.
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