Omni Foundation Hosts Debut of Artyom Dervoed

Last night St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the second guitar recital of the month presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts in its DYNAMITE GUITARS series. Artyom Dervoed was the first Russian to win two of the most prestigious guitar contests, the Michele Pittaluga Guitar competition in Italy and the Her Royal Highness Princess Cristina Competition in Spain. In the United States his touring plans have taken him to Carnegie Hall in New York and Jordan Hall in Boston.

Manzanares el Real, one of the castles “portrayed” in Moreno Torroba’s Castillos de España (photograph by Ramón Durán, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

The major work that Dervoed presented last night was one of the most ambitious collections for guitar composed in the twentieth century. Castillos de España (castles of Spain) amounts of a catalog of relatively brief musical reflections on fourteen different venues, each a castle that had once dominated a particular region of the Iberian peninsula. The music was composed by Federico Moreno Torroba and published in two volumes in 1970 and 1978 respectively. The first volume accounts for eight of the pieces (and I know this because Andrés Segovia made his recording of them in December of 1969), leaving the remaining six for the second volume.

I must confess that ignorance of the “subject matter” probably impeded the extent of my listening capacity. Dervoed presented his own ordering of the individual movements, but each was a self-contained miniature. The venue that particularly seized my attention was “Redaba,” whose musical realization was engagingly cryptic. This occurred around the middle of Dervoed’s ordering, perhaps to serve as a prod to the listener’s attention!

There was a similar prod in the opening selection that preceded Castillos. This was the “Elogio de la Danza” composed by Leo Brouwer. This may have been one of his more prankish undertakings, since the respective rhetorics of elegy and dance seemed to be at cross-purposes! It certainly served to seize listener attention, presumably to prepare for the more extensive journey that was to follow. Another “prod” began the second half of the program, when Dervoed decided to play the two solo guitar preludes by Heitor Villa-Lobos in reverse numerical order! (Villa-Lobos was no slouch in composing for guitar, and that included preludes. This is one of those cases where a catalog number would have been helpful.)

If Moreno Torroba’s suite was not ambitious enough, the major undertaking in the second half of the program was a transcription of the third (and final) movement of Niccolò Paganini’s Opus 7, his second violin concerto in B minor. That movement is best known by its nickname, “La Campanella.” (Fun fact: Paganini’s instrumentation for this concerto included a serpent!) Dervoed delivered a thoroughly engaging account of this chestnut with the sort of panache that would probably have brought a smile to the composer’s face. He then concluded the program with a piece given the subtitle “Omaggio a Paganini,” the “Capriccio Diabolico” by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Dervoed introduced it as “a great piece to play in church,” and the audience definitely appreciated his sense of humor.

Indeed, they received him well at the conclusion of the program. As might be expected, he returned for an encore. Unfortunately, he did not introduce either the composer or the title. Nevertheless, his audience was still enthusiastic.