The Romeros’ Belated Anniversary Tour

2020 was planned to be the year of the 60th Anniversary Tour of The Romeros, the guitar quartet founded in 1960 by Celedonio Romero and his sons Celin, Pepe, and Angel. In 1996 only two of those “founding sons” were still performing, Celin and Pepe, joined by Celin’s son Celino and Angel’s son Lito. That quartet first performed for San Francisco Performances (SFP) in Herbst Theatre in December of 2014. Last night was their first return, concluding this season’s SFP Guitar Series, presented in association with the OMNI Foundation for the Performing Arts. Sadly, Celin was unable to perform; and he was replaced by Angel, who had left the quartet in 1990.

While most of the program was devoted to the entire quartet, Pepe took two solo sets, the second of which was the one flamenco offering of the evening. Celino had a briefer single set, as well as a duo set with Lito. There was a bit of verbal banter over the course of the evening, much of which involved Angel joking about whether or not he could still play.

Needless to say, there was no cause to find fault with any of the performances. All of the quartet performances were arrangements, and they tended to highlight the interplay of the older and younger generations. The duo set taken by Celino and Lito consisted of Pepe’s arrangements of two of the Danzas españolas, the Opus 37 collection of twelve dances composed by Enrique Granados. Each of these had a descriptive title, “Andaluza” and “Oriental” (in “order of appearance”); and the almost evanescent textures of the original piano compositions translated effectively by Pepe into a delicate intimacy.

Where the quartet was concerned, the most memorable set involved arrangements of “Spanish-themed” orchestral work. The set began with the familiar “Danza del molinero” (dance of the miller), a farruca from Manuel de Falla’s score for the two-act ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, originally choreographed by Léonide Massine for Sergei Diaghilev. This was followed by two excerpts from Georges Bizet’s Carmen opera, arranged for guitar by Federico Moreno Torroba and subsequently reworked for the quartet by Celedonio. The arrangement of the “Habanera” acknowledged all the subtle vocal twists in the original score, while the entrance of the toreadors that begins the final act revealed the full splendor of a quartet of virtuoso guitarists.

Taken as a whole, last night was decidedly a never-a-dull-moment experience.