Southwest Guitar Festival
Denis Azabagic: A sculptor in sound
Feb. 7, 2009At intermission of Denis Azabagic’s superb solo recital Feb. 5 for the Southwest Guitar Festival, two youngsters bearing guitar cases marveled at his playing. “Why don’t we ever hear him?” one asked.
Well, of course, that’s one of the reasons that the festival exists -- to bring talents to San Antonio that otherwise might not visit.
Azabagic’ s intelligently chosen program included some familiar works by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Fernando Sor, the guitarist’s own splendid arrangement of a Bach partita for solo flute, and somewhat out-of-the-way but comfortable pieces by Vicente Asencio and Vojislav Ivanovic, who had been Azabagic’s teacher back home in Sarajevo.
Two distinguishing qualities expressed themselves immediately in Villa-Lobos’s Five Preludes, which opened the recital, and throughout the program. The first was the sound of Azabagic’s instrument -- bright, with a forward presence and an ideal balance of metal and wood. The second was Azabagic’s generous sculpting of tempo and shaping of phrases -- not fussily, but in a way that always seemed to grow out of the music itself. He was perhaps less interesting, though technically impressive, in brilliant passages, such as some of Sor’s Variations on Mozart’s Theme (“Das klinget so herrlich” from “The Magic Flute”). When called for, he also summoned a very beautiful vibrato, as in the lovely “La Calma,” one of five atmospheric pieces in Asencio’s “Collectici intim.”
Azabagic explained to the audience in the UTSA Recital Hall that he had arranged Bach’s Partita for Solo Flute, BWV 1013, while his left thumb was out of commission following a bicycling accident about a decade ago. The piece is something more than a mere arrangement: “Expansion” might be more accurate, given the way the single flute line and its implied harmony are redistributed to take advantage of the guitar’s contrapuntal and chordal possibilities.
Two of Ivanovic’s “Café Pieces” (and a third offered as an encore) were an agreeable hybrid of classical and popular styles, without the irony and broad strokes of Paul Schoenfeld’s more-familiar “Café Music.”
Mike
Greenberg
