Mateusz Kowalski’s San Francisco Debut

Last night in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the young Polish virtuoso guitarist Mateusz Kowalski made his San Francisco debut as the latest solo guitarist in the 2023/2024 Dynamite Guitars series of concerts, presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. Almost all of his program was devoted to Polish musicians serving as either composers or arrangers. The most interesting of these was probably Jan Nepomucen Bobrowicz, named by Franz Liszt as “the Chopin of guitar.”

That epithet was closer than one might expect, since Bobrowicz was a contemporary of Frédéric Chopin. He prepared guitar arrangements of Chopin’s piano music, apparently with the composer’s approval. Last night’s program included five of those arrangements, all based on the composer’s early mazurkas. In the first half of the program, Kowalski played the first, third, and fourth mazurkas from the Opus 7 set; and the second half of the program included the second and third mazurkas from the Opus 6 set. These mazurka arrangements may have fallen a bit short in the composer’s passionate rhetoric, but they still captured the underlying spirit of the dance.

Bobrowicz was also represented as a composer at the conclusion of the program with a performance of his Opus 6, “Grandes variations sur un duo de l’opéra ‘Don Juan.’” The opera was, of course, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 527 Don Giovanni; and the duo was “Là ci darem la mano,” which was also given a set of variations by Chopin. Because Kowalski had prepared such a rich and diverse program, I personally would have preferred this set of variations to precede the intermission, since there was much for the attentive listener to follow in the composer’s approach to rethinking a familiar theme.

Indeed, attention had to contend with novelty for almost all of the program that Kowalski had prepared. The other Polish composers included the guitarist Stanislaw Szczepanowski (a friend of Chopin), Marek Sokołowski, Felix Horetzky, and Marek Pasieczny, who contributed a three-movement suite as a memorial for Chopin. The second half of the program began with two more familiar composers. The first of these was Roland Dyens’ solo guitar arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte.” This was followed by Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, arranged for solo guitar by Emre Sabuncuoğlu, a Turkish mathematician as well as guitarist, arranger, and composer. The other arrangement in the first half of the program was by K. Mianmi, setting the “Schafe können sicher weiden” (sheep may safely graze) aria from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 208 secular cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (the lively hunt is all my heart’s desire).

Taken as a whole, this was an abundant program. There were any number of opportunities to appreciate Kowalski’s technical skills, and his approach to repertoire introduced a rich offering of Polish compositions unfamiliar to most of the audience. I suspect that there is much more to learn from the repertoire he has cultivated, meaning that a return visit is probably in order!