Measures from Johann Friedrich Agricola’s copy of the Double movement from Bach’s BWV 997 lute suite, which Isbin and Lubambo used as a departure for their duo improvisation encore (from IMSLP, public domain)
Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances presented the first concert in its 2018–2019 Guitar Series, offered in partnership with the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The program presented the American guitarist Sharon Isbin and the Brazilian guitarist Romero Lubambo. Most of the evening featured their performing as a duo, but each half of the program allowed each musician to take a relatively brief solo set. Considering that Isbin’s work is firmly rooted in the classical repertoire, while Lubambo is a major jazz guitarist, the combination was surprisingly effective without any sense of either performer compromising his/her approaches to performance.
Indeed, it was when their respective styles were superimposed that the results were at their most magical. The first taste of this came when Isbin performed the third of the waltzes in Antonio Lauro’s Valses Venezolanos collection, during which Lubambo improvised what amounted to a descant elaboration on Lauro’s theme. The real tour de force, however, came at the end of the evening. The program indicated that the final selection would be Laurindo Almeida’s arrangement of the Adagio movement from Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” The way in which both guitarists shared both the solo and accompaniment material was engagingly seamless; but, when it came to the cadenza, Lubambo clearly had ideas of his own. He launched into an extended riff on his innovative signature approach to Brazilian jazz guitar, going far beyond any of the inventiveness that Gil Evans had concocted for Miles Davis.
On the strictly classical side Isbin used her first solo set to play familiar works by Spanish composers known for their virtuoso piano technique, Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz. Their respective selections were “Andaluza,” the fifth in the 1890 collection of Spanish dances, transcribed for solo guitar by Miguel Llobet, and “Asturias (Leyenda),” arranged by Andrés Segovia. What is interesting is that, as pianists, both of these composers often sought to evoke guitar sonorities in their keyboard work. Both of the selections provide excellent examples of their respective success in doing so, making arrangement of this music for guitar sort of a “round trip.” Isbin’s solo set was preceded by a duo version of the “Miller’s Dance” from Manuel de Falla’s score for the ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, in which an orchestral ensemble had its own turn at evoking guitar sonorities.
On the jazz side the program acknowledged Antônio Carlos Jobim with two selections. However, Lubambo’s first solo set involved improvising on a bossa nova tune by Cal Tjader; and, in his second solo set, he played one of his own compositions. Improvisation also flourished during the encore selection that followed the Rodrigo performances. The source for the improvisation was the Double movement (itself an exercise in embellishment that may have originally been improvised) that follows the Gigue movement at the end of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 997 lute suite in C minor. This emerged as a dazzling compounding of embellishment upon embellishment, sending most members of the audience out of Herbst with a bounce or two in their respective steps.
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