Guitarist Stephanie Jones Makes Her Debut

Australian guitarist Stephanie Jones (photograph by Oceanica Photography, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, Australian guitarist Stephanie Jones gave her debut performance for the first program in the San Francisco Performances Guitar Series, which was also the second program in the Dynamite Guitars series of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. Readers may recall the preview article that described Jones’ repertoire as “impressively diverse;” and last night’s program probably provided most of the audience with two previously unfamiliar Australian composers, Richard Charlton and Ross Edwards. As a result, most of her offerings tended to be short but consistently sweet.

The one exception was Ástor Piazzolla’s Estaciones Porteñas, known in English as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. Piazzolla composed these four pieces separately for his own ensemble, but they were collected into a single suite and arranged for guitar by Sérgio Assad. Since Piazzolla himself never ordered these pieces, it is probably the case that each of the “seasons” was selected to begin the cycle by different performers. Jones decided to begin with winter, following the calendar through to a conclusion in autumn.

I have to confess that I am familiar with Assad’s arrangement through David Tanenbaum’s New Albion album, El Porteño. As a result, I took a certain degree of engaged familiarity in following how Jones mastered the intricate techniques of Assad’s arrangement. The listening experience was a bit like encountering an old friend and a new one at the same time, and I would be only to happy to get another chance to further listen to Jones’ approach to the “synthesis” of Piazzolla and Assad.

Taken as a whole, however, the program offered a generous number of “first contact” experiences. Both of the Australian composers evoked the natural world through their works. The first of these was Charlton’s “Black Cockatoo Flying Alone….” This was followed by the two contrasting movements of Edward’s “Blackwattle Caprices,” named after the bay near the composer’s home.

More interesting was German guitarist Jakob Schmidt, who has performed extensively with Jones and happened to be in the audience last night. He has composed a series of “Progression” pieces for solo guitar, the first of which was given the title “There is no morning just light.” I was particularly amused to encounter snippets from the opening movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1052 harpsichord concerto in D minor (which, for all I know, may have been an accidental coincidence). Bach was give more explicit attention at the beginning of the program, with Jones playing two movements from the BWV 1006a lute suite in E major.

The program concluded with Roland Dyens’ arrangement of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “A felicidade.” Jones then returned for her encore selection, Richard Johnson’s arrangement of the Irish folk song “A Vision of Angels.” Taken as a whole this was an evening in which keenly focused performances encouraged attentive listening from an audience that seemed totally engaged on the diversity of Jones’ repertoire and her technical command of each selection.