An Abundance of Guitarists at St. Mark’s

Last night St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the fourth recital in the 2023/2024 Dynamite Guitars series of concerts, presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The title of the program was Maestros of 50 Oak Street, an acknowledgement of the impressive Guitar Faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, whose primary address is 50 Oak Street. The four guitarists to perform last night were (in alphabetical order) Sergio Assad, David Tanenbaum, Richard Savino, and Marc Teicholz. All of them performed solo compositions, Assad played a duo with Teicholz, and all four concluded the program with two selections from the Filmaginaires collection of short works by Roland Dyens. In addition, Savino’s set included a duo with violinist Scott Moore. The program was also given an “overture” presented by the SFCM Guitar Youth Orchestra and members of the SFCM Guitar Community Ensemble. Scott Cmiel conducted a performance of “Bluezilian,” composed by Clarice Assad (Sergio’s daughter).

This made for an evening longer than most guitar recitals. Presumably, “Bluezilian” was intended to draw a generous audience of “friends and family;” and it succeeded in doing so. Sadly, after that selection was performed, there was a noticeable exodus after all the family members had filled their telephones with photographs and videos. Fortunately, there was still a good crowd that had showed up for the 50 Oak Street players.

Tanenbaum assembled an engaging set of works by composers with little (if any) knowledge of the guitar. They were Manuel de Falla, Francis Poulenc, and Thomas Adès. The Falla selection was taken from his Homenajes suite, originally composed for orchestra. The second movement was a memorial for Claude Debussy given the subtitle “Elegia de la guitarra;” and Falla prepared his own arrangement for guitar. He also acknowledged Debussy with a fragment from “Soirée dans Grenade” (evening in Granada), the second of the three compositions in Debussy’s Estampes collection. The Adès selection, on the other had, was originally composed for his opera The Exterminating Angel.

In that “geographical” context Assad focused his set on Brazil with two selections by Luiz Bonfá and a samba by Jacob Bittencourt. Teicholz took the Opus 55 piano suite by Joaquín Turina, entitled Danzas Gitanas (gypsy dances), and arranged the movements for solo guitar. This was a significant undertaking with highly satisfying results. I was also left wondering whether Stephen Sondheim had appropriated the “Dance of seduction” movement when he was working on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

The only disappointment was Savino, who trashed the selections in the printed program and mumbled his way through announcing the alternatives. Nevertheless, his duo performance with Moore based on the “Folia” theme was engaging to the extent that some of the variations on the repeated bass line may have been improvised. Taken as a whole, the full set of guitar selections left much to occupy the attentive listener, who probably would have sustained the guitar performances more attentively had the “Bluezilian” overture been eliminated from the program.