Last night Chinese guitarist Xuefei Yang returned to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church to perform a solo recital for the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts Dynamite Guitars season. This was her first appearance following the COVID pandemic, having given her last performance in San Francisco in December of 2019. Fortunately, she has been keeping busy and this past June was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music. In addition, a little over a month ago, she released her latest album, Guitar Favourites, produced by UMG (Universal Music Group) China on the Decca label.
Yang began last night’s program with one of the major selections from that album, Fernando Sor’s Opus 9, given the title “Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Mozart.” While Sor is probably best known for his didactic compositions, Opus 9 deserves a significant place in the canon of variations form. He took one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s simplest tunes, the chorus sung by slaves enchanted by Papageno’s magic bells in the first act of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 602 opera The Magic Flute, and wove around it some of the most challenging technical passages in the classical guitar literature.
Having gracefully negotiated all of those challenges, Yang then moved on to another major undertaking, which was probably also composed for didactic purposes. This was Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1009 (third) suite for solo cello in the key of C major. Yang transposed this music into G major, which allowed greater resonance for the open strings providing richer sonorities. With that one exception, she played the music as Bach wrote it, bringing rich expressiveness to the series of dance movements that followed the traditional Baroque structure. The result was familiar thematic material presented in an unfamiliar context that could not have been more engaging.
Yang then concluded the first half of her program with her one Chinese selection. This was her own transcription of the “Sword Dance” composed by Xu Changjun. Xu is currently Chancellor of The Tianjin Juilliard School and President of the Tianjin Conservatory of Music. Yang’s selection was a “first contact” experience for me, and I was probably not the only member of the audience to make that claim! Within that constraint, I found her transcription to be a refreshing shift from the more formidable undertakings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The second half of the program consisted of shorter compositions. Taken as a whole, the selections represented different stylistic aspects of music from a variety of different Latin American countries. The most familiar of these was “Manhã de Carnaval,” which Luiz Bonfá composed for the film Black Orpheus. Bonfá was one of many composers to be influenced by Antônio Carlos Jobim, who was also represented on the program by Roland Dyens arrangement of his “A felicidade,” which was also composed for Black Orpheus. Yang chose to lead this portion of the program with two short pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos, the first of which, the first of his five preludes for solo guitar, was one of the more engaging tracks on Yang’s Guitar Favorites album. The other composers she presented were Agustín Barrios, Leo Brouwer, Emilio Pujol, and Paco Peña.
Audience enthusiasm led Yang to conclude the evening with two encores. The first of these was taken from Guitar Favorites and was her own original composition. “Xinjiang Fantasy” is based on folk tunes that originated in the Xinjiang region of China. Her second encore was “Eterna Saudade,” composed by Dilermando Reis. Taken as a whole, the evening constituted a highly engaging journey of discoveries, leaving many of us to hope that we shall not have to wait long for a return visit.
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