Liverpool Guitar Society announce Steven Joseph Hickey concert in Feb 2012

Working in conjunction with Hope University, Liverpool Guitar Society are very pleased to be able to promote a concert by Liverpool born, award winning guitarist Steven Joseph Hickey, on Friday 17th February 2012 at the Capstone Theatre in Liverpool.

Steve was a student at the Royal Northern College of Music under the tutelage of classical guitar luminaries Craig Ogden and Gordon Crosskey. A highlight of his time in Manchester was performing Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint at the ‘Future Everything 2011’ festival in Manchester, with the composer present.

Now studying for a Masters degree in London at the Royal College of Music, Steve has also established the London Guitar School earlier this year.

In this concert Steve will be performing works by Brouwer, Gary Ryan, Barrios and J.S. Bach, and will also revisit Steve Reich’s stunning multi-guitar composition Electric Counterpoint.

He will be supported by a classical guitar ensemble set from The Liverpool Guitar Society.

Full details of times, prices and the venue here,

Review: Xuefei Yang at Pacific Road (27 Nov 2011)

The final event of the 2011 International Guitar festival heralded a return to Merseyside of Xuefei Yang, the Beijing-born classical guitarist.  She has had many-a-concert in Liverpool but this is her first visit to Birkenhead.

Fei’s programme was an all-Spanish affair (with a little Leo Brouwer thrown in for good measure).  So often, classical programmes are a mix of styles from various eras, with the player trying out some lesser known composers or pieces to see how they work out, and it makes me wonder if the Spanish pieces are sometimes thrown in to give the audience something to recognise.  Here, though, was a programme dedicated to a celebration of some of the great Spanish composers.  Tarrega, Albeniz, Malats, De Falla, Sainz De La Maza and Rodrigo formed the basis for the performance.

Two pieces from Franciso Tarrega were performed.  The first one, opening the show, was the Fantasy on Themes from La Traviata; seven minutes of evocation straight into the heart of Spain to get us in the mood for the programme.  This piece is a beautiful demonstration of the techniques needed to play Tarrega music, notably the motion-blurred speed of the right hand (for right handers) which Fei demonstrates with apparent ease time and time again.

Following the Albeniz suite (see below) Fei went on to play the second Tarrega piece, the madness that is the Variations on the Carnival of Venice.  If you’ve never heard or seen this, I suggest you follow the link.  It is a circus of Tarrega technique that will, I’m sure, amaze and astound.  It was great to see this played beautifully and expertly before our very eyes by Fei.

It’s very easy to forget that Isaac Albeniz was a talented pianist and composer for piano.  When heard on CD, the notes of Albeniz’s music arranged for guitar flow out of one’s speakers like water flowing down a babbling brook, with areas of turbulence throwing out little swirling eddys between other areas of smooth calm.  The music is so quintessentially the sound of the Spanish guitar that it is hard to imagine it even being played on another instrument let alone it being originally composed for one!  But even this pales ino insignificance when the same music is played before your very eyes and ears by one so talented as Fei.  Her deft touch extracts every ounce of emotion from the pieces in a way that is quite breathtaking. Only the keen-eyed amateur guitarist would note the dropped D tuning and those tendon-wrenching counter melodies and think “hang on, what sadist would write guitar music like this?”…answer: Albeniz, on his piano.

Fei played the Suite Espana – Seis Hojas de Album Op.165 (not to be confused with the Suite Espanola Op.47) consisting of:-

Preludio
Tango
Manageuna
Serenata
Capricho Catalan
Zortzico

Type any of the the above composers names into Google and you’ll get a Wikipedia hit somewhere near the top.  All except Joaquin Malats.  There is an entry on the Spanish Wikipedia site which I could translate but, alas, my Spanish is trés…er…baddio?  In fact, the recurring hits you will find are the freely downloadable score for Fei’s next piece, the Serenata Espanola.  Malats was another virtuoso pianist and composer and, in fact, Albeniz wrote the Iberia Suite especially for Malats.  This piece was later transcribed for guitar by Tarrega.  I was berated by Fei later in the evening for admitting to not knowing this piece – hey, at least I’m honest.

The pianist theme continues with the next piece, the Spanish Dance from the one-act opera written by Manuel De Falla, La Vida Breve (Life is Short).  This is most often seen arranged as a duet (you can see the Bream and Williams version here) which is indeed impressive, but Fei has transcribed this for solo guitar and this sight read as her first public performance of it, which to me was equally impressive.

For yours truly, the next piece was the highlight of the show.  I was so far on the edge of my seat for this one that I nearly fell off completely.  Fei’s performance of Rodrigo’s Invocacion y Danza (Invocation and Dance) was simply astounding.  She admitted that she know the piece so well, and it showed.  In this dark homage to De Falla, Rodrigo hints at the works of De Falla (Le tombeau de Claude Debussy, El sombrero de tres picos, El amor brujo) and one could literally imagine the invocation of the ghost of the subject’s dead lover, and the nightly dance that they have.  The ghost fades away with the coming of the dawn.  Fei’s delivery of this piece was spellbinding.

The last Spanish composer to feature in the set was Regino Sainz De La Maza (not to be confused with his younger brother, also a guitarist, Eduardo).  One of the younger composers in the set, Sainz De La Maza was friend to Segovia and was a world travelled performer.  Fei gave us splendid performances of three of his pieces.

El Vito
Petenera
Zapateado

The final piece for the programme (straight out of left field) was the Sonata by Leo Bouwer.  This is one of the few sonatas written for guitar and is in three movements, the Fandangos and Boleros, Sarabande of Scriabin and the Pasquini Toccata.  All played with exquisite precision and control, this was an exciting (tho slightly odd choice) ending to a memorable concert.

Fei returned to the stage to much applause to play a Chinese piece for us called Yi Dance.  Originally written for a Chinese instrument called the pipa, this was very evocative of Chinese music (not that I know much about Chinese music) and was a very beautiful piece which belied its complexity.  If tremelos are too easy for you, try it with two strings instead of the usual one to up the difficulty level.

I play golf. Tiger Woods plays golf. We both do the same thing…we get a metal bat out and smack a small white ball three, four, five hundred yards.  I’m a 28 handicapper, he’s the greatest golfing talent the world has even known.  What’s the difference?  Well, surprisingly little; better contact with the ball, better decision making, a keener eye, better consistency; all little things.  But those things are what separate a doofus like me from a world champion.  And so it is with the guitar.  How hard it it to pluck a string?  Most folks could have a go at that.  But the way Fei plucks the things, you’d think she had made a pact with the devil.  The perfect control of tone and dynamic is nigh on impossible for us 28 handicappers, for reasons unknown.  It is the musical knowledge and sheer artistic talent that drives Fei to be a great musician, but in the end it is that elegant mastery of simple physics that turn what is a basic machine into music that can make a grown man weep.  How she and others do it, I guess I will never know.

Steve Gaskell
LGS

Review: Katona Twins at Pacific Road Arts Centre (20 Nov 2011)

Six weeks. That’s all we have left (miracles aside) of the Pacific Road Arts Centre on Shore Road in Birkenhead.  At the end of 2011, the council will be putting it up for sale.  The only gigs here will be at special request.  If you have a Facebook account, you can go and show your support here.  So if you have time and tickets, get yourself over and catch some of the last guitar festival events to be hosted at the venue.  Personally I’ll be very sad to see the place close.  It is a great venue.  I’ll heading back next week to see Xuefei Yang and, in December, I will revisit the place to see Glenn Tilbrook (of Squeeze fame). If you’ve never seen him live, I highly recommend it – an amazing performer.

However, on this occasion I took my seat with the rest of the distinguished clientele (Mike McCartney, the roving members of the Chester Guitar Circle) to enjoy the dual virtuosity of the Katona Twins.  These two have played all over the world to audiences that number in the thousands.  To have them here on the doorstep at our little venue was a real honour. (Ok they live here, but nevertheless…still an honour)

Anyone who knows the work of these two performers will understand that this would not be a traditional classical guitar recital.  The Katona Twins are a fusion of classical, flamenco and modern styles and musical genres. Playing (dare I say, identical, twin,) electro-accoustic/classical guitars and walking about the stage…what ARE they thinking? But of course, this is what they do. And what they do, they do very well indeed.

Opening with the Overture from the Barber of Seville (Rossini), the duo wasted no time in loosening up the phalanges and gave a glimpse of the impeccable accuracy of their duet playing.

The duo proceeded to perform their arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody.  A remarkable single guitar arrangement of this is played by the virtuoso Edgar Cruz but the divestment to two guitars makes the whole thing somewhat smoother and less fraught.

Just to keep the audience on their toes, we made a quick leap backwards 200 years to Boccherini.  The Fandango with its flamenco stylings of fast rasgueados, tremelos and “castanet” drummings on the guitar body is an extremely challenging piece for us mere mortals. This was played with nonsensical accuracy by the two.

Clearly the Liverpool Guitar Ensemble’s recent showcase of Come Together by The Beatles has been an inspiration to the Katona Twins.  Their performance was, well, how can I put it….quite good.  Ok, this is possibly an understatement.  If we had a straw poll of who’s was rendition was better, I suspect I know who’s might nip into an early lead.  Still I’m very proud of ours.

The gut twisting time travel continued as we shot back to the baroque period.  The last two pieces of the first set were by Scarlatti.  The first, a sonata in Cm was unsullied by Katonan hand and beautifully played…however the second, Metamorphosis, is definitely a unique arrangement.  I’m no Domenico Scarlatti expert but I’m reasonably certain he didn’t use drum solos and blues scales.  However, this piece is a perfect example of what the Katona Twins are about – it is a microcosm of what they do.  They have taken the essence of the original piece, and made a new modern work that is exciting and entertaining, and which brings the guitar alive for new audiences.  We, the Liverpool Guitar Society, can learn much from these two – this is something our ensemble aspires to do.

And then there was beer.

The second set opened with a world premiere performance of an, as yet, unnamed piece written by Peter.  It is based on the novel The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky (hey, you want art? you got art!). This was a multi-faceted piece and, it seemed to me, had rhythms reminiscent of mazurka and musical structures reminiscent of Eastern Europe.  This could be the Russian influence of Dostoyevsky or the Hungarian influence of the twins’ origins…or I could be mistaken altogether! It was a quite wonderful and varied piece and I can honestly see it becoming part of the twins’ regular playlist.

The four pieces from Carmen (Bizet), I have no doubt, elicited the greatest applause from the audience.  For a start this is a popular work, yes, but the pieces were played absolutely note-perfect – the very definition of crowd-pleaser.  We were treated to Seguidilla, Danse Boheme, Aragonaise and Les Toreadors.

A prime example of the skills required in duet playing was demonstrated in the next piece, the Spanish Dance No.2 by Granados.  This is a sublime piece with a section where both players are playing artificial harmonics together in ritenuto.  I swear there wasn’t a single note out of sync. Maybe it’s the mysterious power of the twin, maybe it was a cheat and was really a recording….but I suspect the truth is they’re just damned good at this.  The crowd loved Carmen – I loved this, and my socks were duly blown off.

A further world premiere piece penned, this time, by Zoltan preceded a Katona-style take on Vivaldi, and the twins closed the concert with virtuoso performances of De Falla‘s Pantomime and Firedance.

Encores of Albeniz‘s Mallorca and another Katona-esque arrangement of The Doors (Light My Fire) known as Doors of Fire….(a good name, since Fire Doors seems a bit… well… functional).

It’s not difficult to see why these two are popular, and pull in crowds in big numbers.  They make the guitar accessible to all.  Anyone who has any appreciation of the instrument or music in general will be entertained here. Again, this is an aim of our Society, to bring the beauty of the guitar to all.

There is one down-side in my opinion.  The use of pickup-only guitars does seem to rob the instrument of much of its raw tonal variation.  There’s no string swoosh and the reverb from the PA smooths over any cracks there might possibly be.  Personally, those little imperfections are what make the guitar sound the way it does and I was disappointed in this regard.

But on the whole, it was an amazing performance and a lesson for all players who wish to take on the might of the guitar ensemble. Interestingly, the arrangements transfer the lead from player to player in a very seamless way and there isn’t a dominant player.  So get practicing – it’ll be a while before you’re as tight as these two.

Steve Gaskell
LGS