David Russell’s Video for SFP

Today provided my first opportunity to view the first video presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) through its new Front Row Travels series. This was a solo recital by guitarist David Russell, a frequent visitor to San Francisco under SFP auspices in better times. While he was born in Glasgow, he moved with his family to the Spanish island of Menorca at the age of five and now lives in Spain in Galicia. He prepared a program of performances in three different twelfth-century churches, all of which are located along the Camino de Santiago the path of pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.

He began in Carrión de los Condes at the Church of Santiago. His selection was a suite in the French style of eight dances by seventeenth-century Walloon Jacques de Saint-Luc. He then moved to Villalcázar de Sirga and its church of the Virgin of Villasirga, known as Santa María la Blanca. At this venue he played a more contemporary composition, a seven-movement suite by Steven Goss. The suite basically involved contemporary embellishments of three medieval sources, the Cantigas de Santa Maria collection of poems about miracles attributed to the Virgin Mary set to music by Alfonso X of Castile, the Cantigas d’amigo found in the Martin Codex, and a setting of the Kyrie text from the Mass. The journey then concluded at the Church of San Martín de Frómista, where he played two chorale preludes by Johann Sebastian Bach taken, respectively, from the Schübler Chorales (BWV 645) and the BWV 147 cantata (best known through the English translation, “Jesus, joy of man’s desiring”). He then concluded with the nineteenth-century composer Giulio Rigondi, playing his Opus 21, the first of his “Air Varié” compositions.

David Russell in Santa María la Blanca (screen shot from the video being discussed)

This was a video in which the diversity of the settings was as impressive as the diversity of the program selections. Audio capture was equally impressive, always finding the right way to deal with the intimate sounds of the guitar in cavernous spaces. In many ways that intimacy reflected the times of the twelfth century, when entering a church at all was an intensely personal experience. In the overall offering Russell showed a keen sense of how to alternate between secular sources and those that more explicitly reflected on the venues in which he performed.

The result was a program that constituted a journey unto itself, reflecting both the journey through sacred spaces and the journey through the repertoire that Russell had prepared.