Two Guitar Quintets from Two Centuries

Quatuor Van Kuijk members Nicolas Van Kuijk, Sylvain Favre-Bulle, Anthony Kondo, and Emmanuel François (photograph by Svend Andersen, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances presented, in conjunction with the Dynamite Guitar season created by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, the second of the five programs in its 2022–2023 Guitar Series. Guitarist Sean Shibe, born in Edinburgh in 1992, is currently touring the United States along with Quatuor Van Kuijk, a string quartet founded in Paris in 2012 by violinists Nicolas Van Kuijk and Sylvain Favre-Bulle, violist Emmanuel François, and cellist Anthony Kondo. All five of them performed two guitar quintets, one at the end of each half of the program.

The first of these was the so-called “Fandango” quintet composed by Luigi Boccherini. The program concluded with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Opus 143 quintet. The quartet members also began the evening with a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s final string quartet in F minor. Mendelssohn died two months after completing the work, and it was published posthumously as his Opus 80. In addition, Shibe performed three short solos composed, respectively, by Thomas Adés, Manuel de Falla, and Francis Poulenc, prior to the Castelnuovo-Tedesco quintet.

Taken as a whole, this was a low-key program; but Herbst provided a conducive setting for the intimacy of all of the offerings. This was particularly the case with the two guitar quintets. In both of the performances, Shibe fit comfortably into the intimate “conversations” one usually encounters in a string quartet performance. As a group they captured and affectionately presented the many Hispanic tropes; and, where the Castelnuovo-Tedesco quintet was concerned, those familiar with the score may have wondered if Shibe was channeling Andrés Segovia, for whom the quintet was originally composed. A similar sense of intimacy pervaded Shibe’s solo offerings.

In that context the decision to begin with the Mendelssohn quartet felt a bit out of place. Perhaps the quartet players felt that they should begin on the “dark side,” after which the sun would shine on the rest of the program. Certainly, the intensity they brought to Opus 80 made the attentive listener sit up and take notice. From that point of view, the sunny dispositions of the remainder of the program may have felt more welcome.