I last heard guitarist Yuri Liberzon almost exactly a year ago in an Old First Concerts solo recital at Old First Church. I described his program as “covering compositions from the seventeenth century to the recent past.” Yesterday afternoon he returned for another Old First Concerts recital, this time bringing along as guests two other guitarists (Josh Friedman and Patrick O’Connell) and a flutist (Meerenai Shim). The scope of his repertoire was equally broad, although the sonata by Domenico Scarlatti (K. 1 in D minor), with which he began the program (using his own transcription), was probably composed in the early eighteenth century.
In the more recent domain Liberzon returned to compositions by his fellow Russians, again performing Sergei Rudnev’s arrangement of the folk song “Lipa Vekovaia” (the old lime tree) and introducing the duet “Vision,” from the Two Russian Pieces by Konstantin Vassiliev. Vassiliev was the youngest of the composers on the program; and he works with a rich palette of sonorities, all of which Liberzon and O’Connell rendered with a skillful ease. This duo also performed what was probably the most modernist composition on the program, “Nagoya Guitars,” a transcription of Steve Reich’s 1994 “Nagoya Marimbas.” Originally composed for two marimbas, this was transcribed for two guitars by David Tanenbaum with Reich’s collaboration. Reich has a particular knack for counterpoint among closely-knit voices of identical sonorities. One best appreciates the subtlety of his counterpoint when one observes the movements of the performers to sort out the voices, and watching Liberzon and O’Connell had just this stimulating and informative effect.
The primary focus of the program, however, was on two forms of dance, waltz and tango. The former was represented by the Valses poéticos of Enrique Granados, first published in Ilustración musical hispano-americanain 1894. This is a cycle of eight waltzes preceded by a polka-like introduction and concluding with a reprise of the first waltz. It was composed for solo piano and performed as a guitar duet by Liberzon and Friedman in a transcription by Heinz Wallisch. This has very much the feeling of an integrated work whose individual movements are stops along an imagined journey. In the broader scope of music history, one might situate this composition between the Opus 39 collection of waltzes, composed by Johannes Brahms in 1865, and Maurice Ravel’s 1911 Valses nobles et sentimentales. Liberzon and Friedman offered an intimate reading (perfectly enhanced by the Old First acoustics), which nicely captured this sense of a personal journey.
Tango was represented by Ástor Piazzolla in his four-movement suite, Histoire du Tango, for flute and guitar. The movements represent four different settings for tango music: a bordello in 1900, a café in 1930, a nightclub in 1960, and the present-day concert hall. For the listener the suite amounts to a gradual immersion in increasing sophistication of melodic line and harmonic accompaniment, culminating in a witty take on intimations of atonality in the final movement. Shim was perfectly comfortable with the virtuoso demands in the flute line, a side of Piazzolla’s composition that is seldom heard. Liberzon led the way through the adventurous path of the final movement.
The only sad note of the afternoon was that the next two concerts on the Old First Concerts schedule have been cancelled due to injuries. These are the performances on the coming weekend on both Friday evening (August 26) and Sunday afternoon (August 28). As a result the next concert will be the return of Mike Greensill, his wife Wesla Whitfield, and some friends for an American songbook gig on Sunday afternoon, September 4, at 4 PM.
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