Dublin Guitar Quartet Finally Comes to SF

Last night in Herbst Theatre the Dublin Guitar Quartet of Brian Bolger, Pat Brunnock, Chien Buggle, and Tomas O’Durcain finally made its San Francisco Debut. The group had originally been scheduled to perform for both San Francisco Performances and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts in February of 2022. However, this was a time when the world was beginning to recover from the COVID pandemic and several years of plans had to be rescheduled.

Unless I am mistaken, all of the works on the program required arrangements, primarily of keyboard music and string quartets. Most impressive was the amount of attention given to Philip Glass. As might be expected, this included two of the string quartets, the second (“Company”) and the third (“Mishima”); but the ensemble also took on four of the piano études (2, 9, 16, and 20). These were judicious selections of compositions intended for keyboard technique that could be recast as exercises in fingering technique.

As might be expected, the results differed significantly from the original keyboard sonorities; but the Dubliners knew how to endow each of the phrases in the original scores with their own unique character, which still honored the spirit of Glass’ music. The reworking of the quartets was somewhat more straightforward, but the ensemble knew how to capture the spirit behind the music through its own unique sonorities. The same could be said of the group’s transcription of Arvo Pärt’s “Summa.”

The program included two other works that involved reconceiving string quartet music. The first of these began the performance, Bryce Dessner’s “Aheym,” which was composed for the Kronos Quartet. The second was a selection of movements from Marc Mellits’ Titan, which added a bass clarinet to the string quartet instrumentation.

Personally, I found this to be one of the weaker offerings. Mellits’ instrumentation suggested an interest in contrasting sonorities, which clearly could not be realized by an ensemble of four guitars. More satisfying were the movements selected from Book of Leaves by Kentucky-based Rachel Grimes. This music was originally written for piano; but the thematic content translated to the guitars with little difficulty, particularly when reflecting on such traditional folk tunes as “The Wayfaring Stranger.”

My one difficulty involved the relatively narrow spectrum of sonorities that the Dubliners brought to their performance. I have listened to enough guitar recitals by now to appreciate the diversity of those sonorities based on a wide variety of technical foundations. Last night there was more uniformity than I would have anticipated. However, if transcription took priority over sonorous stylization, one could still appreciate the expressiveness of the transcribed content.