Ana Vidović’s Omni Recital for This Year

Guitarist Ana Vidović (courtesy of the Omni Foundation)

Readers may recall that, almost exactly a month ago, guitarist David Russell made one of his regular visits as a recitalist for the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. Last night another “Omni regular” returned to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. This time the soloist was Croatian guitarist Ana Vidović, who has been giving performances here since her debut in 2002.

She began her program with an ambitious undertaking. As a tribute to guitarist Julian Bream, she performed her own solo arrangement of Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” This was an impressive undertaking. It also showed her discretion in eliding any of the instrumental passages that simply could not be accommodated by her instrument. Nevertheless, even with those “gaps,” her account of the spirit of the music could not have been more engaging, providing an energetic start to the impressive journey she prepared for her program.

Her other undertaking as an arranger involved a selection of four of the keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, which were performed immediately after the intermission. These were more accommodating to arrangement. What struck me as interesting, however, were the ways in which her guitar work allowed for subtleties of expressiveness that would probably not have been consistent with a keyboard interpretation. There is a certain irony behind her technique, given that there are any number of influences of Spanish guitar music scattered across Scarlatti’s many keyboard sonatas!

The only other arranged selection on the program involved the efforts of a fellow Croatian. The Rodrigo concerto was followed by a transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1006 violin partita in E major by Croatian cellist Valter Dešpalj. (In all likelihood, Vidović came to know Dešpalj during her studies at the Academy of Music, affiliated with the University of Zagreb.) Vidović’s approach to Bach was a faithful one, but one could appreciate how her expressiveness was based on her command of guitar technique. (Mind you, any effort to imitate a violin would have been ludicrous!)

The other composer to received “extended attention” was Federico Moreno Torroba. Vidović played both his three-movement sonatina and his Suite Castellana. Between these selections she played the three-movement La Catedral suite by Agustín Barrios. I first came to know this music through Xuefei Yang’s Guitar Favorites album and definitely appreciated the opportunity to listen to it in recital. (Yang made her most recent Omni appearance in March of last year.)

As might be expected, the audience would not let Vidović leave without an encore. She turned to another familiar number in the guitar repertoire, Leo Brouwer. She played “Un Dia de Noviembre” (a day in November). This amounted to a brief reflection on days growing shorter, which concluded the engaging journey of discovery of the entire program with a bit of quietude.