Omni to Premiere Holcomb Video Recital

Alec Holcomb with his guitar (courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

Having covered the latest video shoot for the Live from St. Mark’s concert series a little over a week ago, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts announced yesterday the launch of its next live video program. The performances are streamed through the Omni Foundation YouTube channel; and the home page for those videos includes a SUBSCRIBE hyperlink, which enables notification every time a video is added to the collection. The guitarist to be featured on the new video will be Alec Holcomb.

The program covers music from the early nineteenth century to the present. The earliest work on the program is Mauro Giuliani’s Opus 61, given the title “Grande Overture.” This music for solo guitar was composed in 1809, which (as a “fun fact”) is the year before the birth of Frédéric Chopin. It is therefore a bit interesting that Holcomb turned to Chopin for his second encore selection, the seventh, in the key of A major, of the 24 preludes collected in Opus 28. Holcomb concluded his program with his own arrangement of the first and third movements of Gaspar Cassadó’s three-movement suite for solo cello.

The best-known of the living composers (at least here in the Bay Area) is Sérgio Assad. Holcomb performed his “Imbricatta,” which the composer describes as structured in ten asymmetrical layers. The other living composers on the program are Reinhold Westerheide (“Mistral”) and Daniel De Togni (“Sing Me into Singing”). The other encore selection is “The Claw” by the twentieth-century composer Jerry Reed, who died in 2008.

The video will become available for viewing at noon on Sunday, October 9. The YouTube Web page has already been created with a “countdown display” in the lower left hand corner. That window has a “Notify me” hyperlink. The video was recorded this past August 26; and, like the recording of Marko Topchii made this past September 27, the performance took place in front of a live audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Video production was by Matthew Washburn, and the audio was mastered by Sienna Digital.