Guitarist Pepe Romero Returns to Herbst Theatre

Pepe Romero (photograph by Trace Haskins, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night Herbst Theatre hosted the latest guitar recital presented jointly by San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The program was a solo performance by Pepe Romero. He introduced his program by saying that this would be the last recital given in his 80th year, since he will turn 80 this coming March 8. He then added that he was looking forward to further performances in his 90s.

Romero has been giving recitals for SFP since May of 1992, and this was his tenth solo appearance. His program provided a diverse account of music as early as the sixteenth century and as recent as the twentieth. Not all of the music was written explicitly for guitar, and Romero prepared his own arrangements of nineteenth-century piano compositions by Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz.

The major offering on the program was an account of all five of the preludes composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos. This was my first encounter with the complete set; but their strongest advocate was probably Julian Bream, who probably has the best recorded account. One often tends to think of preludes from a pedagogical point of view; but, following in the footsteps of Claude Debussy, each of these has a programmatic title. Fortunately, these were included in last night’s inset of program notes! The only contemporary composer on the program was Romero himself, who concluded with his own “Fantasia Cubana.” His encore was his own arrangement of one of the most popular Spanish songs, Sebastián Iradler’s “La Paloma.”

Much of the pleasure of last night came from Romero’s chemistry with the audience. He kept his remarks to a minimum, but they always deserved attention. When it seemed appropriate, he would reflect on some aspect of the music he was about to perform; but, for the most part, he let the composers speak for themselves.

Taken as a whole, this was very much an “old school” experience; but, regardless of the “vintage” of any of the selections on the program, Romero knew exactly how to endow it with the freshness of the immediate present.