Omni Foundation’s Zhang-Shi Video

As was announced yesterday morning, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest Live from St. Mark’s video at noon today. The recitalists were guitarist Tengyue (TY) Zhang performing with violinist Strauss Shi. Since the Omni Foundation focuses on the guitar repertoire, Zhang began the concert with a solo performance of “Clown Down,” the third movement from Roland Dyens’ Triaela suite. He was then joined by Shi for the remainder of the program.

For the most part the program consisted of relatively short compositions, reaching back as far as Antonio Vivaldi and coming up to the recent present with Horacio Fernandez, who was born in 1996. However, the program concluded with Astor Piazzolla’s four-movement suite Histoire du Tango, originally composed for flute and guitar but allowing a violin to substitute for the flute. The movement titles present representative years and settings in tango history:

1. Bordel 1900
2. Café 1930
3. Nightclub 1960
4. Concert d’aujourd’hui

Shi was comfortable enough with the score that he had no trouble spicing it up with additional embellishments, while Zhang’s guitar work disclosed an engaging spectrum of varied sonorities.

The other work that seems to have been composed with the violin-guitar duo in mind was Fernandez’ Suite Latin-Americana. Shi and Zhang performed the “João” movement, named for João Gilberto in his capacity as one of the pioneers of the bossa nova movement. Since it was completed in 2020, the suite was the newest work on the program; and, while Fernandez was born roughly half a century after the emergence of bossa nova, both the composer and the performers seemed to know exactly how to honor this landmark in the history of Latin American music.

Two of the selections were arranged by the performers. The earlier of these was Domenico Scarlatti’s K. 141 keyboard sonata in D minor, which, while it was composed for keyboard, seems to have been written with mandolin effects in mind. The other was “Tico-Tico no Fubá,” the popular Brazilian choro song written by Zequinha de Abreu. Equally memorable was the encore, a performance of a traditional Chinese tune entitled (in English) “Horse Racing” and conceived to represent two horses chasing each other. For this selection, Shi exchanged his violin for a traditional erhu, a two-stringed bowed instrument that is amenable to violin technique.

Strauss Shi accompanying guitarist Tengyue Zhang with his erhu (screen shot from the video being discussed)