Julián Arcas: Spanish Guitarist Goes to the Opera

Late this morning, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, in partnership with Alhambra Guitarras and D'Addario, released its latest OMNI on-Location video on YouTube under the title Masters of Alicante - Omni on-Location from Spain. The “masters” were three of the top guitar students at the University of Alicante (in Spain) in 2025. The students were, in “order of appearance,” Sohta Nakabayashi, Marta Foullend Heferer, and Hayoung Lee.

Marta Foullend Heferer performing Arcas’ fantasia on Verdi’s music (screenshot from the Omni on-Location YouTube video)

The repertoire reached all the way back to the second half of the nineteenth century with Heferer’s performance of the “Fantasía Sobre Motivos de la Traviata de Verdi” (fantasy on motifs from Verdi’s La Traviata) an engaging journey through some of the most memorable themes from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera arranged by the late nineteenth-century composer Julián Arcas. Those arrangements could not have been more perceptive, and Heferer’s account of Verdi’s spirit could not have been more engaging. She coupled this with Ida Presti’s “Danse Rythmique,” an impressive display of skilled technique. Equally impressive were the technical skills that Lee brought to her performance of Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Toccata.”

The opening selections, performed by Nakabayashi, coupled the late nineteenth century with the mid-twentieth. He began with the Drei Tentos by Hans Werner Henze, an engaging display of abstraction over the course of three relatively short movements. This was followed by Francisco Tárrega’s set of variations on the familiar “Carnival of Venice” song. Both of these offerings more than adequately provided a convincing account of Nakabayashi’s capacity for dexterity.

Taken as a whole, the “program” of the video provided an engaging balance between familiarity and novelty. From a personal point of view, I particularly enjoyed the “bookends” of the entire video. Much to my disappointment, I have not encountered a performance of Henze’s music since December of 2022, when Richard Worn, bass player for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, performed his “San Biagio 9 Agosto Ore” on a program shared with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, based at the University of California at Berkeley. During his lifetime, Henze met with a fair amount of rejection due to both his homosexuality and his embrace of Marxism. Now that such inclinations no longer provoke, opportunities to listening to his music are on the rise, albeit gradually!