Guitarist Vidovic Disappoints at St. Mark’s

Croatian guitarist Ana Vidovic (from her SFP event page)

Last night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts jointly presented a solo recital by Croatian guitarist Ana Vidovic. Thanks to the Omni Foundation, Vidovic has been a regular visitor to San Francisco; but this was only her second SFP appearance since her SFP debut in December of 2006. The program was an imaginative combination of original compositions for solo guitar and arrangements, yet the evening as a whole turned out to be a disappointing one.

Over the course of the entire evening, the high point came after the intermission with Vidovic’s performance of the three-movement suite La catedral by Agustín Barrios (Mangoré). Mangoré was a skilled miniaturist, and the longest of his three movements tends to run only about three minutes in duration. Nevertheless, the music clearly pays homage to Johann Sebastian Bach’s mastery of contrapuntal technique, while the middle movement, “Andante religioso,” also recalls the expressiveness of aria solos in Bach’s sacred music.

While Vidovic approached these miniature studies with a solid command of technique, she never quite caught the expressiveness behind Mangoré’s effort to honor Bach’s memory. This turned out to be a critical flaw that pervaded the entire evening. Every selection posed its own set of technical challenges, all of which were met with confident execution. However, little thought seems to have gone into endowing each of those selections with its own distinctive rhetorical stamp that made it more than a technical exercise.

This was evident at the very beginning of the program, an arrangement of Bach’s BWV 1013 partita for solo flute in A minor by Croatian cellist Valter Dešpalj. While Vidovic made some acceptable tactical decisions about when to take Bach’s repeats, she always approached the conclusion of a section with a ritardando that suggested she had come to a conclusion, only then beginning her repeat of the section. In other words she never knew how to establish what literary theorist Frank Kermode called “the sense of an ending.” When first encountered in the opening Allemande movement, this was disquieting; but by the end of the partita it had become downright annoying.

However, from a diagnostic point of view, this particular trait, which Vidovic brought to many of her other selections, was probably a symptom of a much larger problem. No matter whose music she happened to be playing, there was little sense of a convincing account of how the thematic material was phrased. Rising to technical challenges never seemed to be a problem, but making those accomplishments rhetorically compelling did not appear to occupy Vidovic’s attention. Thus, while her four selections of short pieces by Francisco Tárrega promised a variety of different “character styles;” the sequence as a whole had an almost numbing sameness across its four offerings.

The bottom line was that what promised to be a fascinating evening of listening discoveries turned out to be sadly uneventful.