William Kanengiser’s Solo Guitar Recital

Guitarist William Kanengiser (from the SFP event page for this performance)

Here in San Francisco William Kanengiser is probably best known as a member of the frequently-visiting Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. However, this past Friday evening he appeared in Herbst Theatre as a guest artist with the Alexander String Quartet in the third of the twelve Summer Music Sessions concerts presented by San Francisco Performances, and last night he returned to the series in Herbst to give a solo recital. The program was only about an hour in duration, but the selections reached back to the early eighteenth century of Santiago de Murcia and forward to the world premiere of “Lost Land,” by the Iranian composer Golfam Khayam.

Kanengiser prepared his own program notes for the accompanying booklet. However, he supplemented those texts with brief verbal introductions for each of his selections. Nevertheless, he left it to the printed text to account for his arrangement of Murcia’s music. Because this had been composed for a much earlier generation of guitar, an arrangement for a contemporary instrument was in order. Kanengiser played a three-movement sonata that probably would have registered with anyone familiar with the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, but Scarlatti did not move to Spain until ten years before Murcia’s death. Thus, it is feasible that this guitar sonata had an impact on Scarlatti’s own work, rather than the other way around.

The more familiar Spanish rhetoric could be found in five short pieces by Francisco Tárrega, four of which were mazurkas. Born in 1852, Tárrega was familiar with much of the music composed during the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the music appealed to him enough that he prepared guitar transcriptions of piano music by composers such as Frédéric Chopin and Felix Mendelssohn. Presumably, his transcriptions of Chopin mazurkas led him to try his had at composing some of his own!

The rest of the program was devoted to music by composers born during the twentieth century. Khayam’s work was particularly engaging through her ability to evoke the sonorities and rhetoric of traditional Persian music without intruding on her own capacities for expressiveness. A more radical shift of “geographical rhetoric” could be found in the three “African Sketches” composed by Serbian-born Dušan Bogdanović. His interested in African instruments required Kanengiser to insert staples between some of his strings to achieve the twangy sonorities that inspired Bogdanović’s compositions.

Kanengiser had time for an encore, which took him back to the first half of the twentieth century. He played one of the most familiar works by Manuel de Falla, the “Danza del molinero” (dance of the miller), composed for Léonide Massine’s two-act ballet The Three-Cornered Hat. Falla was never shy about drawing upon traditional Spanish sources, and guitarists have never been shy about rearranging his music for the traditional Spanish guitar. Kanengiser’s approach made for a welcome visit from an old friend, just the right way to conclude a program that, in its entirety, was a richly engaging journey of discovery.