Manuel Barrueco Wraps Up Dynamite Guitars

Manuel Barrueco at his last visit to Herbst Theatre in October of 2019 (photograph by Brian McMillen taken on October 13, 2019, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts concluded its 2024/2025 Dynamite Guitars concert season in conjunction with the final recital in the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series. This was the sixteenth SFP appearance of Manuel Barrueco, having made his debut in 1989. He prepared a program of guitar compositions by Manuel Ponce, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Joaquín Turina. He also began each half of the program with one of his own transcriptions.

The evening began with his arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 suite in D major, composed originally for solo cello. To begin the second half, he performed arrangements of the first three movements in the Tango-Études collection by Astor Piazzolla. The Bach suite was coupled with Manuel Ponce’s four-movement “Sonata Clásica, Hommage a Fernando Sor.” The remainder of the second half consisted of short works by Heitor Villa-Lobos followed by Joaquín Turina’s Opus 61 three-movement sonata. Barrueco took two encores. He described the first as a Venezuelan waltz, which was followed by an arrangement of one of the tunes of João Gilberto.

Addressing only a few remarks to the audience, Barrueco delivered a highly focused performance. Each of the five composers on the program had his own approach to rhetorical disposition, and Barrueco honored that approach in each of his selections. For example, Bach clearly had his own ideas about how his suite would reveal the breadth of those dispositions across a series of movements based on dance forms; and Barrueco delivered an account that honored the diversity of those dispositions. Piazzolla, on the other hand, examined the earthier qualities of the tango; and Barrueco was not shy in giving those qualities the attention they merited.

Most important, however, was the way in which Barrueco conceived his program as a journey through diversity in both time and rhetoric. His personal disposition was highly focused, determined to guide the attentive listener through the contrasting qualities encountered through that diversity. The result was an experience in which beginning-to-end attentive listening was highly rewarded.