Guitarist Vieaux Partners with Mezzo Cooke

SFP Guitarist-in-Residence Jason Vieaux (photograph by Tyler Boye, courtesy of SFP)

Last night’s guitar recital by Jason Vieaux, co-presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, was a special occasion on several accounts. Vieaux is currently the SFP Guitarist-in-Residence, and this was his third appearance in the SFP Guitar Series. On this occasion, however, he was joined by mezzo Sasha Cooke, who also happened to be making her third SFP appearance. While Vieaux performed two solo selections, the remainder of the program was devoted to duo performances.

From a personal point of view, I was looking forward to yet another opportunity to listen to songs by Franz Schubert accompanied by a guitar, rather than a piano. My “first contact” with this approach took place at one of the SFP Salon programs presented at the Hotel Rex. Baritone Philippe Sly was accompanied by guitarist John Charles Britton, and their partnership led to the release of Schubert Songs an album of sixteen of those songs. Most recently that baton was picked up by Nikola Printz, who sang songs from the D. 957 Schwanengesang and D. 911 Winterreise cycles accompanied by Jon Mendle on guitar as part of their Schwabacher Recital Series program, which they presented a little over a year ago.

Cooke selected four songs for last night’s recital: “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (D. 118), “Schlaflied” (D. 527), “Nacht und Träume” (D. 827), and “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” (D. 774). I was particularly struck by how Vieaux subtly reworked the ostinato pattern of the spinning wheel in D. 188 to accommodate more manageable fingering without disrupting the tension conveyed through that ostinato. As expected, Cooke endowed each of these songs with her own account of the underlying personal dispositions.

The one “cycle” on the program was the opening selection, Manuel de Falla’s collection of seven canciones populares españolas (Spanish folksongs). Falla originally composed this for soprano and piano. According to my records, my last encounter with a guitar performance involved the duo of guitarists Eliot Fisk and Ángel Romero performing without a vocalist. This was also an SFP/Omni offering, which took place in March of 2018.

Personally, I prefer it when a setting of songs involves a vocalist, and Cooke knew exactly how to capture the delivery of each of those seven songs. She brought that same sense of interpretation to the “Aria” movement from the fifth of  Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras compositions. This was originally written for solo soprano and an orchestra of cellos, but last night’s version for guitar and voice was the composer’s own arrangement.

The other arrangement on the program was Roland Dyens’ version of “A Felicidade” by Antônio Carlos Jobim for solo guitar. Personally, I would have preferred to listen to how Cooke would manage the lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes; but, as another song puts it, “you can’t always get what you want!” This was the second of Vieaux’ two solo performances. The first of these was the second movement of the four-movement Paths of Light suite, which Pat Metheny composed for Vieux. It has been a while since I have listened to Metheny’s compositions, and this account left me curious about the other three movements.

The program closed out in a more popular vein. Cooke brought her own take on songs from two of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals, Into the Woods and Follies, both capturing the ways in which the composer could get under the skin of the characters his music had been composed to portray. This was followed by two songs from the Beatles’ White Album, Paul McCartney’s “I will” and John Lennon’s “Julia.” For those of my generation, this felt like a nostalgic reflection on a turbulent past. The duo then returned for one encore. Cooke shifted from the Beatles to Michael Tilson Thomas to sing his “Not everyone thinks like you,” an engaging afterthought for a program of songs rich in their own individual perspectives.