Raphaël Feuillâtre Debuts in SFP Guitar Series

Last night St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the second recital in this season’s San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series. This was a solo debut performance by Djiboutian-French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre. HIs program encompassed a rich diversity of composers. In “order of appearance,” these were Francisco Tárrega, Isaac Albéniz, Miguel Llobet, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Domenico Scarlatti, Agustín Barrios, Antonio Lauro, Leo Brouwer, Sergio Assad, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Astor Piazzolla, and Roland Dyens.

Feuillâtre prepared his own arrangements of the three Albéniz compositions, all of which were originally composed as piano solos. In “order of appearance” these were “Torre Bermeja,” the final movement in the Opus 92 12 Piezas características, “Asturias” from Opus 47, the first Suite española, and “Capricho catalán,” the fifth movement in the Opus 165 España. There were also arrangements by Gerard Abiton (Domenico Scarlatti’s K. 492 keyboard sonata in D major) and Sergio Assad (“Invierno Porteño,” the second of the four movements in Astor Piazzolla’s Estaciones Porteñas set of four tango compositions, better known in English as “the four seasons of Buenos Aires”).

Part of a photograph of Heitor Villa-Lobos, photographed circa 1922 (photographer unknown, public domain in the United States, from Wikimedia Commons)

Assad was also a contributing composer with the “Cateretê” from his fourth Suite brasileira. He was one of the two living composers, the other being Leo Brouwer, represented by his “El Decamerón Negro” work for solo guitar. The most familiar work on the program was Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” Tárrega was one of two composers to contribute multiple offerings. He began the program with “Capricho Árabe” (which is almost as familiar as the “Recuerdos”) followed by one of his four preludes composed in the key of D major. The other was Heitor Villa-Lobos with three movements from his Suite populaire Bresilienne followed by the last piece in his Twelve Études for Guitar, composed in the key of A minor.

Over the course of the entire evening, Feuillâtre never spoke. He did not even introduce his single encore. Since the work was entirely unfamiliar to me, there is nothing I can say about it! Nevertheless, his performance was consistently engaging with a solid command of each of his selections. It would be fair to say that he held his audience in rapt attention solely through his approaches to performing a diversity of styles of guitar music.