In his Old First Concerts solo recital last night at Old First Church, Yuri Liberzon presented a broad array of the guitar repertoire, covering compositions from the seventeenth century to the recent past. Each of the works he selected was performed with a sensitivity of touch and an awareness of sonority refined to the characteristic sounds of the individual strings of his instrument. His performance was, by and large, a quiet one; but it was served well by the acoustics of the sanctuary of Old First Church, which provided an excellent space for the clarity of his execution.
The program he arranged offered a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar composers. The familiar names from the early period were Jean Baptiste Lully and Sylvius Leopold Weiss (familiar at least to those interested in the lute repertoire), both represented by relatively brief single-movement works. Less familiar was Robert de Visée, described in his Wikipedia entry as "a lutenist, guitarist, theorbist and viol player at the court of Louis XIV, as well as a singer, and composer for lute, theorbo and guitar." His compositions included twelve suites for guitar, from which Liberzon played the eleventh in B minor consisting of five movements: prelude, allemande, sarabande, gigue, and passacaille. The music for these suites may well have been drawn from his royal performances; and, while it may lack the sophisticated harmonies and counterpoint of some of Visée's contemporaries, Liberzon effectively evoked the "diversionary" spirit for which it was probably intended.
More interesting musically was an elegy by the Hungarian-Slovak guitarist and composer Johann Kasper Mertz, who was active in early nineteenth-century Vienna. His Wikipedia entry lists his influences as "the pianistic models of Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Schumann;" and the elegy that Liberzon selected definitely reflects the structural approaches towards short pieces by each of those four composers. From a point of view of sonority, however, Chopin seems to have been the strongest influence; and the elegiac spirit may well have been a reflection of the same mood Chopin had evoked in his Lento C-sharp minor etude (Opus 25, Number 7). Liberzon's execution made it clear that his approach to performance could be far more reflective than the more casual approach of the eighteenth-century French court. For technical execution, on the other hand, he was most effective in taking on the Opus 61 sonata by the twentieth-century composer Joaquín Turina, consisting of three brief but impressively demanding movements.
The most recent compositions on the program offered a curious assortment of styles. Liberzon performed works by fellow native Russians, a folk arrangement, "Lipa Vekovaia," by Sergei Rudnev, and three "forest paintings," musical imagery with a heavily modernist flavor by Konstantin Vassiliev. Liberzon also performed some unlikely transcriptions. The first of these was the work of his teacher, Manuel Barrueco, who prepared a transcription of one of Keith Jarrett's improvisations from the recording of his Cologne concert. Then Liberzon concluded his program with arrangements by Toru Takemitsu of two Beatles songs, "Michelle" and "Yesterday." Those who know Takemitsu through his modernist orchestral compositions may think that this was a rather odd project on his part; but the spirit is very consistent with his arrangement of "Sakura" for mixed chorus.
Finally, Liberzon selected an interest pair of "bookends" for the entire evening. He began with one of the many Cuban dance settings by Ernesto Lecuona and performed another of these selections for an encore. These were probably first composed for piano, but the guitar versions were definitely effective in both their Latin spirit and the sonorities that Liberzon selected to evoke that spirit. His overall approach to the evening may have been relatively low-key; but in each selection he found ways to stimulate that ear-mind coupling of the serious listener.
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