Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Marko Topchii’s Diverse SFP Guitar Recital

The second guitar recital presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP), along with the Omni Foundation, through its Front Row Travels series was released this past Thursday. While the first recital, given by David Russell, visited three different twelfth-century churches on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, Ukrainian guitarist Marko Topchii gave his entire performance in St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv. The video began with a series of outdoor views of the church. However, the major visual achievement could be found on the inside with the three-tier iconostasis designed in the mid-eighteenth century by the head architect of the Russian imperial court, Bartolomeo Rastrelli:

Rastrelli’s three-tier iconostasis, which rises above the altar of St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv (from the DiscoverWithDima collection of photographs by Dim Sergiyenko, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)

Topchii performed at the base of this iconostasis. No microphones were visible; but it was clear that this was a very “live” acoustic space. One was readily aware of rich reverberations, but they were never so rich as to obscure the note-by-note details of Topchii’s performances.

The Hispanic selections were provided by two “new world” composers, the Mexican Manuel Ponce and the Paraguayan Agustín Barrios. The program began with the eighth of Ponce’s 24 solo guitar preludes. This was followed by Barrios’ “Un sueño en la Floresta” (a dream in the forest), structured as two episodes. Appropriate to the setting, Barrios was also represented by his three-movement suite, Le Cathedral.

The European side was decidedly balanced in favor of the East. Topchii concluded his program with selections from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition suite. He began with the first two “pictures,” “The Gnome” and “The Old Castle,” each preceded by its “Promenade.” He then leapt to the concluding movement, “The Bogatyr Gates (in the Capital in Kiev).”

That final movement serves up a dazzling spectacle, even when it is played in its original version as a piano solo. Topchii played his own revision of an arrangement by Kazuhito Yamashita, which made it a point to avoid evoking either a piano or an orchestration. Drawing upon his own toolbox of rhetorical devices, Topchii presented an interpretation that may not have duplicated the original version but still evoked the mental imagery that the composer had in mind.

Alexander Scriabin also appeared on the program with the fourth (in the key of E-flat minor) of the five preludes, composed in 1895 and collected in the composer’s Opus 16. Andrés Segovia transcribed this piece for solo guitar, and it can be found on his The Romantic Guitar album. However, rather than play that transcription, Topchii played Alexandre Tansman’s “Variations on a Theme by Scriabin,” delivering a performance that showed as much respect for the “Scriabin source” as for Tansman’s “guitar version.”

The one nod to “earlier times” came with Topchii’s own arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 639 chorale prelude “Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ” (I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ). Bach collected this in his Orgelbüchlein (little organ book); and it is composed for three voices, one for each of the hands and one for the pedal. Topchii’s arrangement brought clarity to each of these lines through a variety of plucking techniques through which the individual voices could be distinguished.

In other words this is a program that will probably appeal to the technical interests of most guitarists, while providing consistently satisfying listening experiences for everyone else.

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