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Beijing Duo Shimmers and Sizzles

Scott Cmiel on December 6, 2010

San Francisco guitar enthusiasts were given a tantalizing glimpse of Meng Su and Yameng Wang, the Beijing Guitar Duo, as guest performers on last April’s recital by their teacher, Manuel Barrueco. So excitement was high on Friday when the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts presented their San Francisco recital debut at the Green Room. They offered a lovely program of 20th- and 21st-century music from Italy and Brazil, plus a striking 1916 arrangement, which has long been controversial, of the Bach Chaconne.

Bejing Guitar Duo: Meng Su and Yameng Wang
Photo by Stephen Spartana

Between 1892 and 1916, the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni worked on his arrangement for piano of the Bach Chaconne for solo violin. Many have criticized its added counterpoint, fuller harmonies, thickened textures, and extra measures as an example of 19th-century excess, while others prize its passionate intensity and claim that its freedom with Bach’s original text prefigures the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and others. The Ulrich Stracke arrangement of the Bach-Busoni, for two guitars, as performed by the Beijing Duo, was a revelation. Their impeccable rhythm and colorful tonal palette allowed both Bach’s original music and Busoni’s additions to shine through with clarity.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was a Jewish-Italian composer who fled Fascist Italy in 1939 and became a film composer in Hollywood, an influential teacher, and a prolific composer of guitar music. His Sonatina Canonica is a three-movement work in a neoclassical style characterized by economy and emotional restraint. The Beijing Duo’s performance was a model of elegant clarity, sumptuously beautiful tone production, and emotional contrast.

Breathtaking Sonic Colors

Two solo performances added to the variety of the recital. Meng Su performed Aquarelle, by Sergio Assad, a composition inspired by a painting technique that uses thin, transparent watercolors. Working from the idea of spreading transparent pigments on paper, Assad created a lovely three-note motif that he used to generate multiple layers and to simulate the superimposition of colors in a visual work. The three-note melodic figure was reinforced by a 3+3+2 rhythmic figure common in northeast Brazil. Meng Su gave the second movement a meditative and improvisational interpretation full of exquisite rubato and colorful effects, ending with a shimmeringly beautiful strummed chord that took my breath away. The Bridge of the Birds, by Carlo Domeniconi, though a less interesting composition, gave Yameng Wang ample opportunity to demonstrate her mastery of tremolo and her incredibly fluent technique.

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Maracaípe, a duo by Sergio Assad, portrays a popular Brazilian beach and was written for the Beijing Duo. Their supremely musical performance captured the vitality of the waves popular with surfers, the melancholy of the beach at night, the humor of a crab’s walk, and the spirit of Brazilian dance that pervades the work. The composer was present at the recital and was given a vigorous round of applause by an appreciative audience.

The recital concluded with a reprise performance of Radamés Gnattali’s Suite Retratos, which the Beijing Duo also played in San Francisco last April. A work in four movements, based on the music of the popular Brazilian composers Pixinguinha, Ernesto Nazareth, Anacleto de Medeiros, and Chiquinha Gonzaga, it is alternately lively and languid and provides an excellent introduction to the joys of Brazilian music of the last century. The enthusiastic audience was rewarded with an encore of the Sonata in D Minor, K. 141, by Domenico Scarlatti in a performance that was stunningly virtuosic.