Omni Video of Mēla Guitar Quartet at St. Mark’s

Mēla guitarists Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Michael Butten, and Zahrah Hutton (screenshot of the video being discussed)

Late this morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest Live form St. Mark’s video. This captured the entirely of the Dynamite Guitars program performed at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church this past March 8. The performers were the members of the Mēla Guitar Quartet: Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Zahrah Hutton, and Michael Butten.

Some readers may recall that they had previously appeared in an OMNI on-location video release at 10 a.m. this past March 3, serving somewhat as a preview for the performance taking place the following Saturday. The “preview video” was of the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, which happened to be the final work before the intermission on the March 8 program. Glinka took five years to compose this opera, completing it in 1842; and these days it tends to be known for little more than that overture. Mind you, when it came to instrumentation, Glinka knew how to pull out all the stops, so to speak. Clearly, the Mēla sonorities were somewhat more limited; but they allowed for better appreciation of the thematic content!

Indeed, in the overall course of their St. Mark’s performance, Mēla never shied away from composers that were all too eager to show off rich instrumentation. The program included two further opera selections by Camille Saint-Saëns (the Opus 47 Samson and Delilah) and Englebert Humperdinck (Hansel and Gretel). The guitarists were just as deft in taking on French keyboard music by both Claude Debussy (the two “Arabesques” compositions) and Maurice Ravel (two movements from Ma mère l’Oye, the “Mother Goose” piano duet).

The fact is that only two of the composers in the program were guitarists creating music for their instrument. The first of these was Laura Snowden, whose “My Clock is Broken!” included percussive effects deftly provided by Hutton. The other was Phillip Houghton, whose Opals was a suite of three movements, each involving a different color of the mineral: black, water, and white.

The duration of the entire video was about 90 minutes. There were only a few moments of reflection on the audience in St. Mark’s for which Mēla was performing. Sadly, I was at another event in the Civic Center when this concert took place; so I am glad that Omni recruited Matthew Washburn to proved a “video capture” of the entire performance.