“Bohemian Rhapsody” as Guitar Quartet

I have to confess that I was entirely ignorant of Freddy Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” when it was first released on Queen’s fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera, in 1975. It was not until Wayne’s World came out in 1992 that I began to take interest. While it was only six minutes in duration, Wikipedia justifiably classified it as a “suite,” whose movements amounted to introduction, ballad, operatic passage, hard rock, and “reflective coda.” (Unless I am mistaken, Wayne’s World only began in the hard rock section.)

Over the years there have been any number of distinctive performances, each approaching music and lyrics in its own idiosyncratic way. Personally, I have to confess that my favorite was when it showed up on The Muppet Show. In that context, I have to admit that it was hard for me to imagine how it would hold up when performed by a quartet of serious concert guitarists.

QuarteTomás guitarists Pepe Payá, Marco Smaili, Francisco Albert Ricote, and Miguel García Ferrer playing the opening passage of Ricote’s arrangement of “Bohemian Rhapsody” (from the YouTube Web page)

So it was that, through the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, I first learned about QuarteTomás, the quartet of guitarists Miguel García Ferrer (the newest member of the group), Francisco Albert Ricote, Marco Smaili, and Pepe Payá. Ricote prepared the arrangement for his colleagues, coming up with a lyrical rhetoric whose distance from Mercury could not have been greater. The group performed on the stage of the Gran Teatro de Elche in Spain, and they were recorded on video by David Rodrigues Salas on January 26 of this year. Overall video direction was supervised by Alvaro Lopez Soriano, and the Omni Foundation has created a YouTube Web page for all to view.

I suppose what I like about this video is the way in which it distills the music itself from the head-banging rhetoric I encountered in Wayne's World, exploring “completely different” rhetorics of lyricism. Since these are all acoustic instruments, it would have been unreasonable to expect any sign of “hard rock rhetoric.” Instead, QuarteTomás has extracted each tune and given it a lyrical delivery. While this clearly goes against the original words that were set to the music, why should anyone worry about how they were originally sung? I suppose the best way to approach this arrangement is as an old spirit taking on a new (and decidedly different) flesh!