Last night Richard Patterson, Founder and Director of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, welcomed the audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church to the first public concert to be offered since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was one of the concerts that Omni shared with the San Francisco Performances Guitar Series. That Series was originally scheduled to begin this past February 12, but the Dublin Guitar Quartet had to be cancelled due to travel concerns related to the pandemic.
Guitarist Laura Snowden (photograph by Ioannis Theodoridis, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)
Last night’s concert was a solo recital by guitarist Laura Snowden, marking her San Francisco debut. Born in York to a French mother and English father, her first influences were Celtic music. Her Wikipedia page describes her as “one of the leading classical guitarists of her generation since being handpicked by Julian Bream to continue his legacy of performing new commissions by leading contemporary composers.” Sadly, that legacy was not in evidence on her program, which, instead, included four of her own compositions.
The high point of the program came at the very beginning of the evening with her performance of Fernando Sor’s Opus 9, “Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Mozart.” Ironically, the theme is taken from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 620 opera The Magic Flute, where it is played by Papageno on his magic bells accompanying the chorus “Das klinget so herrlich” (that sounds so splendid). Sor prefaced the theme with an extended introduction and livened up Mozart’s rhythms with dotted-eighth-sixteenth couplings. However, the variations are demanding; and Snowden found just the right expressive rhetoric for each of them.
Sadly, none of the remaining selections were as engaging as that set of variations. Snowden’s first offering of her own music, “The changing sky,” seemed to involve her vocalizing along with her playing, making for some haunting sonorities. However, like the other three of her offerings, this piece was limited in expressiveness. Sadly, that included her first performance of “Home,” which she composed as a memorial for Bream. Similarly, the other composers on the program, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Johann Kaspar Mertz, Lennox Berkeley, and Agustín Barrios, were given dutiful, but not particularly compelling, accounts.
Nevertheless, her audience was appreciative and was rewarded with an encore, her own arrangement of the folk tune “The Parting Glass.”
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