Beijing Guitar Duo Returns to SFP+Omni

Duo guitarists Meng Su and Yameng Wang (photograph by Wasin Prastlap, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the Beijing Guitar Duo of Meng Su and Yameng Wang returned to the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series, presented in partnership with the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. They have been frequent and consistently welcome visitors since their first SFP recital in April of 2010. They served as SFP Guitarists-in-Residence between 2011 and 2015. This is their sixth appearance and the first since the pandemic.

Over the course of my encounters with them, I have been consistently impressed with their performances of transcriptions of piano music. What made Su’s transcriptions for the first half of the program particularly interesting was that both Claude Debussy’s Petite Suite and Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 56 Dolly were composed for four hands on a single keyboard. To take on even richer keyboard textures, they began the program with a transcription by Matanya Orphee of César Franck’s Opus 18 “Prélude, Fugue et Variation,” which was composed for pipe organ. The clarity they brought to all three of these richly elaborate compositions was nothing short of jaw-dropping.

The second half of the program shifted over to the Hispanic repertoire, beginning with transcriptions of three works for solo piano. The first of these was the Valses poéticos collection by Enrique Granados in arrangements by the guitar duo of Christian Gruber and Peter Maklar. This was followed by Miguel Llobet’s transcriptions of two compositions by Isaac Albéniz, “Sous le palmier” from the Opus 232 Chants d’Espagne collection and “Castilla,” the seventh movement in the first Suite española collection (Opus 47). The program then concluded with Astor Piazzolla’s three-movement Tango Suite, which he composed for his close friends, the guitarists Sérgio and Odair Assad. Taken as a whole, this was a refreshing change in perspective from the French repertoire in the first half of the program.

However, the repertoire returned to France for the first encore. This was a selection from the eighteenth Ordre in the massive collection of keyboard music by François Couperin, “Le tic-toc-choc.” This was followed by one of the movements from Tan Dun’s Opus 1 Memories in Watercolor. (I did not catch the title very clearly, but I think it was the “Herdboy’s Song.”)

It goes without saying that I was delighted to have another encounter with the Beijing Guitar Duo. Their approach to repertoire is consistently inventive, and their technical skills live up to any challenge that confronts them. Su is now on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Hopefully, this means that there will be many engaging guitar opportunities to come.