SFP Guitar Travelogue Concludes in China

Guitarist Xuefei Yang (from the Front Row Travels home page)

Last week San Francisco Performances and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts concluded its Front Row Travels series. This survey of three great classical guitarists began in Spain with David Russell, progressed to the Ukraine with Marko Topchii, and wrapped up with Xuefei Yang playing in the fifteenth-century Zhizhu Temple in Beijing, China. Her program provided a balance of her own arrangements of Chinese selections with Hispanic offerings.

The program began with Yang’s arrangement of a traditional Chinese tune entitled “A Moonlit Night on the Spring River.” Those familiar with Chinese instruments can probably imagine how this music would have sounded in its original setting. Yang was clearly aware of that setting, but she performed with a clear sense of the affordances of her own instrument. As a result the thematic content was given a faithful treatment that was enhanced with new dimensions of sonorities arising from techniques unique to the classical Western guitar. Awareness of those affordances also enhanced her account of Xu Changjun’s “Sword Dance” and the musical visualization “Lake Baikal.” Yang arranged the latter in conjunction with Benjamin Lim Yi, who was in the audience for her performance.

The other “arranged” composition on the program was Astor Piazzolla’s “Milonga del Angel,” which he originally composed for his tango band. Through the Piazzolla album recorded by guitarist David Tanenbaum, I came to know this music in its arrangement by Leo Brouwer. Yang played an arrangement by Baltazar Benitez, which was just as effective in capturing the melancholy rhetoric of the music. This had been preceded by a much more elaborate multi-movement suite by José Luis Merlin entitled Suite del Recuerdo (memory suite).

Equally impressive was “Un Sueño en la Floresta” (a dream in the forest) by Agustín Barrios, a thoroughly engaging account of how the tone poem genre could be rendered through solo guitar music. The program concluded with characteristically Brazilian music by Dilermando Reis, “Eterna Saudade.” (Reis’ music is also in Russell’s repertoire.) The program also included a tango written by a French composer, Roland Dyens. His “Tango en Skaï” was composed in 1985 and remains one of his best-known pieces.

All of this diversity was given a consistently engaging account by Yang with an intricate attention to technique that disclosed the rich expressiveness of each composition.