CMSF Concludes Season with Beijing Guitars

Duo guitarists Meng Su and Yameng Wang (photograph by Sophie Zhai, from the Beijing Guitar Duo Web site)

The Beijing Guitar Duo of Su Meng and Wang Yameng is no stranger to San Francisco. They gave their first recital in Herbst Theatre for San Francisco Performances (SFP) in April of 2010. They have also often contributed to the Dynamite Guitars series presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. Yesterday afternoon’s visit returned to Herbst but this time under the auspices of Chamber Music San Francisco for the final program in the ten concerts in this year’s season.

The final work was the only one explicitly composed for two guitars, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Suite. Su herself provided the arrangement of Claude Debussy’s four-hand piano composition Petite Suite. There was also an arrangement by Sergio Assad, who previously had a major impact on guitar studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He prepared the two-guitar version of Radamés Gnattali’s Suite Retratos, which was originally composed for chamber ensemble. The other guitarist familiar to me was Manuel Barrueco (performing in Herbst exactly one week earlier), who arranged Tan Dun’s Opus 1, Eight Memories in Watercolor. The Beijing Duo played five of the movements from that suite. Enrique Granados was included on the program with his eight Valses poéticos, arranged by Christian Gruber and Peter Maklar; and the program began with Mantanya Ophee’s arrangement of César Franck’s organ composition, Prélude, fugue et variation.

Finally, there was one encore selection. This was an arrangement of “Le tic-toc-choc, ou Les maillotins,” from the eighteenth Ordre in F major from the third book in François Couperin’s Livre de piéces de clavecin. This is one of those keyboard compositions that sounds much better on a harpsichord than on a piano. The plucked strings of two guitars served up an excellent evocation of the spirit the composer had in mind.

Taken as a whole, this was a thoroughly engaging journey through an impressively diverse repertoire. Every composition on the program had its own unique rhetorical stance, and the duo players knew exactly how to capture the full breadth of those stances. It might be fair to note that Su and Wang revisited many of the pieces they presented during their last visit in December of 2023, hosted jointly by SFP and Omni; but that was long enough ago that one could still enjoy the repertoire!