Stylish Work on Eight Strings

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Paul Galbraith, whose Sunday recital at the Florence Gould Theater was sponsored by Chamber Music San Francisco, is a unique figure in the classical guitar world. Winner of the Segovia International Guitar Competition and the BBC Young Musician of the Year Award in 1981 at age 17, he began giving concerts throughout Europe regularly. An unusually thoughtful young man, he subsequently withdrew from concertizing for several years to rethink his relationship to the guitar, technique, interpretation, and music itself.

The most dramatic result was his development, in collaboration with luthier David Rubio, of an entirely new instrument: an eight-string guitar that is held like a cello and uses an end-pin attached to a resonating sound box. The more subtle result is a repertoire that is heavily weighted toward transcriptions of music written for other instruments.

Galbraith had ambitions as a pianist and, seven years after his first phenomenal success as a guitarist, he abandoned the instrument to make a serious attempt to become a professional pianist. Although he put this ambition aside, three of the five works presented on Sunday were originally written for piano. Although I had reservations about the results heard in his recital, I realized that Galbraith is a thought-provoking artist.

The most persuasive of the transcriptions was Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in F, K. 280. Written in 1774 when Mozart was 18 years old, it is among his first mature compositions, and Galbraith gave it a refined, expressive performance. The opening Allegro assai was both vigorous and classically balanced, the Adagio was heartfelt, and the concluding Presto was appropriately playful. Galbraith’s performance of the sparkling passagework was amazing and yet seemingly nonchalant. Less interesting was an Andante cantabile, a lesser piece ascribed to Mozart but of dubious origin.

Also played was Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 5 in A Flat, D. 557, written when the composer was only 19 and trying to come to terms with the intimidating precedent set by Beethoven. In three movements, it is usually considered incomplete because the third movement was composed in E flat and it is unlikely that Schubert wanted the work to conclude in a different key from the first movement.

In any case, the sonata is full of beautiful music, and Galbraith’s playing of it was as meticulous as his interpretations were stylish. The opening Allegro moderato alternated between vigorous fanfare and sentimental introspection; in the Andante, a muted but touching melody frames a wild passage featuring running 16th notes in the parallel minor key; and the closing Allegro showed Schubert’s ambition by its similarities to Beethoven’s contemporaneous piano sonatas.

Tampering With Bach

Bach’s arrangement of his Fifth Cello Suite was the first of many arrangements for plucked strings of his unaccompanied violin and cello music. Bach’s arrangement corrects inconsistencies in voice leading necessitated by the range of the cello, clarifies some textures, and enhances the lower voice. Galbraith’s arrangement of Bach’s Fourth Cello Suite (BWV 1010) went considerably further by unnecessarily adding bass lines and even counterpoint.

I found the results less persuasive than the original. Some of Galbraith’s interpretive choices seemed questionable. He gave the Prelude’s opening arpeggios a relentless, almost pounding interpretation, and began the Sarabande so close to the attack of the last note of the Courante that it was disorienting. The virtuosic conclusion of the Prelude was astonishing, though, and the concluding Gigue was dancelike and satisfying.

British composer Lennox Berkeley’s Theme and Variations, Op. 77, is an elegiac, seven-minute work that expresses a wide variety of moods in a short period, with wonderfully idiomatic writing for the guitar. Galbraith expressively managed the many articulation, coloristic, and interpretive demands with ease. Ironically, it was the most satisfying music of the afternoon.

Galbraith says that he avoids the guitar repertoire and plays transcriptions “simply because I want to play good music.” That led him, for all his interpretive and technical ability, to offer a recital that consisted mostly of early works by Mozart and Schubert and what I thought to be some dubiously arranged Bach — not a program that would inspire many pianists.

The Berkeley Theme and Variations were written in 1970 for the great British guitarist Julian Bream at a time when the guitar repertoire was expanding in exciting ways. Bream recognized the awesome intellectual achievement of the composers who created the repertoire for more established instruments, and he made it his mission to inspire composers to create outstanding music for the guitar. Galbraith would be a more interesting artist if he followed Bream’s example.

Scott Cmiel is chair of the guitar and musicianship departments in the preparatory division of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.