A Disappointing Guitar Recital in Herbst

Guitarist Miloš (photograph by Christoph Köstlin, courtesy of SFP)

Last night saw my first visit to Herbst Theatre in the New Year. The occasion was a solo guitar recital presented jointly by San Francisco Performances and the Dynamite Guitars series of programs presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The recitalist was Miloš Karadaglić, who performs under only his first name and (at least in last night’s program book) all in capital letters. Sadly, the quality of his performance never quite rose to the level of his imaginative presentation of self.

The title of his program was The Arts and the Hours. This was the title of interlude music for Les Boréades, the last of the five operas composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau. The program note by Scott Cmiel suggested of this music that “one could almost imagine Mahler writing in the late nineteenth century;” but he was probably looking at Rameau’s score, rather than listening to Miloš’ interpretation on guitar, which lacked any sense of dramatic flow that one tends to expect from an interlude.

Much of the program was devoted to Rameau’s contemporaries, including (in order of appearance), Sylvius Leopold Weiss, George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Domenico Scarlatti. The Handel selection was identified only as “Menuet” but was not particularly recognizable as a minuet, let alone one by Handel; and Miloš’ approach to the chaconne movement from Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor suggested that his understanding of Bach was no more secure. This concluded the first half of the program, while the entire program finished with “Amor Fati” by Mathias Duplessy, which was composed for a centenary recital for the guitar legend Andrés Segovia, based on his guitar arrangement of the BWV 1004 chaconne. Both accounts were equally disappointing, as was the Bach-inspired “Andante Religioso” movement from “La Catedral” composed by Agustín Barrios.

The one composer that “got some respect” from Miloš was Tōru Takemitsu, who had composed a set of transcriptions entitled 12 Songs for Guitar. His arrangement of Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” was the penultimate work on the program, while the encore selection was “Yesterday” composed for The Beatles by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. It is unclear how much Takemitsu knew about the guitar, but his knowledge of music was impressively diverse. Last night he emerged as the “saving grace” for an otherwise tedious encounter.