Omni Releases Video of Norway Festival Winners

One week ago from today, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest video of classical guitar performances. The performers were the five prize winners of this year’s Tino Andersen International Guitar Festival, which took place in Bergen, Norway. Two of the guitarists were Greek and the other three were from the Ukraine, Croatia, and Germany, respectively. One of them, Ukrainian Marko Topchii, has performed here in San Francisco; and, in October of 2022, I released an article about a video he had recorded for the Live at St. Mark’s seres presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The other four guitarists were Ioanna Kazoglou and Filippos Manoloudis from Greece, Nikica Polegubic from Croatia, and Benno Panhans from Germany. According to my records, I have written twice about videos of Manoloudis over the course of this year, one an OMNI on-Location video recorded at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main and the other as part of the Emerging Stars of the Guitar video.

At the risk of revealing a personal bias, I have to say that I was particularly engaged by Topchii’s offering on this new video. He played the first movement (“Modéré”) of Maurice Ravel’s sonatina for solo piano. What struck me while listening is that his approach to arrangement made the music sound as if it had originally been written for guitar (without ever compromising the music’s underlying rhetoric)! Equally interesting was my first encounter with Polegubic. He performed the Sarabande movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1012 solo cello suite in D major in a manner that found an approach to phrasing that would be more appropriate for the guitar than for the cello.

I was also glad to encounter an “old friend” in the form of the “Invierno Porteño” movement from Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteños. Whether this was Sérgio Assad’s arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s music, which he made on a commission by Albert Augustine, Inc. and New Albion Records, or an original arrangement by the performer, German Benno Panhans, I cannot tell! In any event, this music was an “old friend” for me; and I definitely enjoyed the encounter. The other arrangement that I particularly enjoyed was that of a prelude-fugue-prelude composition by Louis Couperin, in which the prelude was composed without a metric signature.

Ioanna Kazoglou playing the Villa-Lobos study at the beginning of the video being discussed

Finally, it is worth noting that the only music actually composed for the guitar was the first selection. This was the last of the 12 Studies for Guitar composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos in 1953. The performance by Kazoglou definitely got the entire video off the a stimulating start.