San Francisco Classical Voice

Never mind. From then on it was all up. There were two sets for flute and guitar: Jill Heinke and Rodrigo Placencia in the last two movements of Piazzolla's Histoire du tango, and Laura Snodgrass and Jacob Kramer in Dusan Bogdanovic's brief Prélude. The former duo was handicapped a little by Heinke's somewhat square flute playing. She has a pleasing, round tone, but I wish she had taken a leaf from Snodgrass' interpretive book; Snodgrass' zesty, rhythmically punchy playing was half the fun in the Bogdanovic. Tanenbaum, introducing the piece, mentioned that it involved "prepared guitar": staples were evidently attached to two of the strings to alter the sound. When I heard a couple loud, buzzing snaps (like Bartók pizzicati) not far into the work, I first assumed this was what he meant; but later on, when Kramer was playing way up the fretboard, there was another timbre that I couldn't account for, a sort of wash of unusual overtones that suggested a mbira or maybe a steel drum. Marvelous.

Though hardly more so than any number of other sonorities Friday night. The evening was an education in never underestimating guitarists. The timbral variety was just one thing, though impressive enough in itself — the three players (including Tanenbaum) in a recently-rediscovered Lou Harrison Elegy for Harpo Marx (written in 1964 and probably not played since) contrived to sound eerily like harps. In quite another direction there was Michael Bautista's ass-kicking electric-guitar account of the Preludio from Bach's E-major violin Partita — a performance that should have been subtitled "Every Teenage Violinist's Secret Fantasy." I often come out of a concert thinking "I wish I could do that," but not always in such a spirit. Was it cool that Bautista was also the dexterous acoustic-guitar second soloist in the Brandenburg? Why, yes, it was.

And then there was the ensemble playing. I am used to small string ensembles — trios, quartets, and the like — where all the members are incredibly responsive to one another. There was some ensemble playing Friday that seriously belongs in a class with the top young string quartets. The trio of Brian Dowdy, Hunter Mah, and Jose Rodriguez, who (Tanenbaum said) want to make theirs a permanent ensemble but don't have a name yet, played a quirky little suite by one Eberhard Werdin, whom evidently even they knew nothing about. As far as I'm concerned, the three of them can play whatever they please so long as they do it like that. They took that pleasant but slight piece and made it fascinating — playing throughout with control and coordination that I bet a lot of young quartets wish they had.

Almost as fine was the "Iranian Guitar Duo," brothers Babak and Pedram Falsafi, whose story Tanenbaum related in one of his emcee moments. The younger of the brothers was a Conservatory student; he was always talking about his elder brother, another guitarist, who couldn't get a visa . . . currently, Tanenbaum concluded his introduction, the younger brother is a second-year grad student and the elder, who finally did get a visa, is a sophomore (undergraduate). They played a set of variations on an unmemorable Venezuelan folksong by Marc Khalfia (another composer on whom the Conservatory doesn't seem to have been able to turn up any information). I think it's fair to say that when the title "Theme and Variation on a traditional Venezuelan theme" was proved to have a typo in it by the arrival of the second variation, at least a few people disappointedly resigned themselves to a long sequence of variations; but no one could complain of the playing — crisp and gentle by turns, and always sparklingly together.

There were a few other brief pieces (including a fine duo, Danza Bruja, written by a Conservatory student in his early twenties, Santiago Gutierrez, and deftly performed by himself and fellow-student Adam Roszkiewicz), but the grand finale was just that. It was Benjamin Verdery's 1991 Scenes from Ellis Island, a glorious collage for large guitar ensemble and a pair of flutes (how handy that two flutists were required elsewhere in the program!). The piece is almost literally all over the place, one moment sentimental, the next full of drastic, even frightening special effects. A dozen or so guitarists all glissandoing to the very end of the fretboard while frantically strumming make a fearful sound. A little later there were other effects — knockings on instruments, what looked like strings distuned so that they could be sluggishly strummed like rubber bands — but then there was also freshman Jonathan Mendle, looking even younger than a freshman, and playing, with quite extraordinary delicacy, music the very contrary of avant-garde, tender and naive.

The piece eventually finds its way into a complicated but still "grooving" ostinato, one of those "OK, six plus six plus five plus three plus two and two — hey, I get it!" deals that probably looks terribly complex on paper but flies effortlessly into the ear, and the fingers. Verdery gives that just enough buildup before launching his not-so-secret weapon, an electric guitarist (Bautista here, of course), who does a soaring rock-anthem solo over the ostinato that ends the piece. May I say — to soloist and conductor and composer and backing band and concert organizers — that that was extremely cool?