Southwest Guitar Festival
Dunne, Gast shine in new Balentine piece melding Modernist and Brazilian idioms
February 5, 2009The Southwest Guitar Festival opened ambitiously on Feb. 4 with a new piece for guitar, horn and chamber orchestra by San Antonio composer James Scott Balentine, a suite of Beatles songs arranged for guitar and chamber orchestra by Cuban master Leo Brouwer and a late concerto by Manuel Ponce of Mexico. Matthew Dunne, who apparently didn't have enough on his plte as the festival’s director, was the guitar soloist in all three works. The venue was the Recital Hall at UTSA’s Loop 1604 campus.
In the three movements of “Triqueta,” Balentine melds Modernist, jazz and folk Brazilian sensibilities. The very active rhythms and serpentine, restless lyricism are rooted in Brazil, but they also sometimes seem informed by the Second Viennese School, especially in the first movement, “Circulo Vazio -- Variations on an Expanding Universe.” The second movement, “Espirales Infinitas,” is pensive and fragrant. The finale, “Esferas da Vida,” is the most overtly Brazilian; lively outer sections, in which the percussionists lay down a difficult folk rhythm in handclaps, flank a central waltz.
The orchestral backdrop, for strings, piano and percussion, is contrapuntally complex -- perhaps too complex at times, though the muddy patches may be attributable to inadequate rehearsal by the orchestra of UTSA faculty and students, conducted by Eugene Dowdy. The timbres of the two solo instruments blend very nicely, and Balentine’s writing for both is idiomatic. Michael Gast, a former San Antonio Symphony player who is now principal horn of the Minnesota Orchestra, was a first-class collaborator with Dunne, who played with considerable fluidity and a wide color range in this new work and throughout the evening.
Brouwer scored his enterprising but respectful arrangements, gathered under the title “From Yesterday to Penny Lane,” for guitar and strings. The arrangements suited Dunne’s somewhat relaxed, laid-back musicianship and showed off his very sensitive phrasing.
Ponce’s “Concierto del Sur” of 1941, dedicated to the great Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia, draws on Flamenco and other Spanish folk elements. Dunne may have carried his relaxed approach a shade too far in the central andante, which wanted more dynamic contrast, but his subdued dramatic sense worked nicely in the lengthy cadenza of the opening allegretto.
The all-student UTSA Orchestra, conducted by Dowdy, sounded quite decent in the Ponce. Special notice goes to clarinetist Henry Cruz and flutist Abigail Wilde.
Mike
Greenberg
