Pablo Garibay’s Omni Recital at St. Mark’s

Guitarist Pablo Garibay (photograph by Jesús Cornejo, from the artist’s Web site)

Last night the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts returned to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church for the second program in the 2024/2025 Dynamite Guitars season. The offering was a solo recital by guitarist Pablo Garibay. The program reached back to the early nineteenth century with its opening selection, the “Elegie” of  Johann Kaspar Mertz, and extended into the recent present with “L’Ultimo Caffé Insieme” by Simone Iannarelli.

However, the two most familiar composers on the program were major proponents of twentieth-century guitar music. The earlier of these was Mexican Manuel Ponce, who was represented by his three-movement “Sonatina Meridional.” The other was Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos with a performance of three of his guitar etudes. These were coupled with Roland Dyens’ “Hommage à Villa-Lobos,” given the subtitle “Tuhu.” (Dyens was generous to his contemporaries, having also composed an homage for Frank Zappa and an elegy for Leo Brouwer.) The second half of the program was devoted entirely to a four-movement sonata by Antonio Jose, who died in his mid-thirties early in the twentieth century. This was followed by an encore selection by Antonio Lauro, whose title was not named.

Throughout the entire evening, Garibay commanded a disciplined technique with consistent attention to the expressiveness of each selection. He offered only a few informative remarks for a straightforward “bread and butter” performance. Nevertheless, over the course of six compositions (along with an encore), he offered a journey through a diversity of rhetorical connotations in his choice of selections. That diversity clearly satisfied his audience of attentive listeners.