An Omni Foundation Video from Spain

I doubt that I shall ever keep up with the full extent of the video library compiled by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, but that will not impede my semi-regular efforts to account for videos I find particularly interesting. Today the library led me back to QuarteTomás, whose members are Miguel García Ferrer, Francisco Albert Ricote, Marco Smaili, and Pepe Payá. I first encountered them in a video of a performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” based on an arrangement by Ricote. Today’s experience, on the other hand, was decidedly more Spanish in nature, turning to a composition by Vicente Asencio.

QuarteTomás guitarists Pepe Payá, Marco Smaili, Francisco Albert Ricote, and Miguel García Ferrer playing the opening passage of Asencio’s “Tango de la Casada Infiel” (from the YouTube Web page)

My guess is that this name is not familiar to most readers. Nevertheless, both Andrés Segovia and Narciso Yepes championed his compositions. Now in a “new century,” Ferrer has taken up the torch with an arrangement for four guitars of Asencio’s “Tango de la Casada Infiel.” This was released as a YouTube video by OMNI on-Location, the series of concerts performed in historic sites. In this case the venue was the Gran Teatro de Elche in Spain.

The title is taken from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, which translates into English as “The Unfaithful Married.” Asencio may have captured Lorca’s dark rhetoric in his original composition, but Ferrer’s arrangement is more interesting for the diversity of interplay among the four performers. This is less a matter of whether or not each of the performers can be identified through an individual characteristic style and more a rich study of the contrasts that arise as the musicians couple in different ways, each with its own unique approach to exchange. Do those contrasts reflect the tensions of a marriage that was clearly not made in heaven? Listen to the music, and decide for yourself!