Chamber Music Sedona launched its 42nd season on Sunday, Dec. 8, with an appearance by classical guitarist Jason Vieaux, who performed a couple of Johann Sebastian Bach classics for lute alongside a couple of pieces written by and for himself. In a twist, it was the contemporary works that offered the most interesting material for once.
Vieaux opened with Bach’s Lute Suite No. 4, a transcription of the Violin Partita No. 3, although whether Bach originally intended the transcription for lute has become a subject of debate among musicologists in recent years. Whatever the original instrument may have been, Bach, as usual, took a technical and intellectual rather than emotional approach to it, except at the very beginning and end of the work. The prelude, in his very distinctive style, exhibited a great deal of minimalistic repetition, setting the tone for the afternoon, that required agile right-hand work from Vieaux. The extreme simplicity of the following loure, a slow dance movement that was elegant without being overstated, gave way to one of Bach’s most recognizable melodies in the gavotte and rondeau, which alternated between the secure, almost complacent main theme, and a more doubtful variation, calling for greater concentration on Vieaux’s part. The two menuets were light and airy, reflecting the preceding theme, albeit more casually, as they lacked the call-and-response alternation of ideas explored in the previous movement. The bourree was cheery and playful and the gigue even more so, with plenty of flourishes, possibly reflecting JSB’s attempt at a galant style and trying to let his wig down just a trifle.
The first half of the concert also included a waltz by Agustin Barrios, whom Vieaux described as “the Chopin of the guitar,” that was fast, bright and conversational, like a trellis of roses perfuming the morning sunshine, occasionally tripping over itself and interrupting its own melody, and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “A Felicidade,” composed in 1958 for the film “Black Orpheus.” With its probing urgency and jauntiness, the Jobim piece was comparable to a fun but slightly loopy friend apt to throw you off balance. It made considerable use of dynamic changes that Vieaux exploited impressively, to the admiration of the guitarists in his audience.
Perhaps the most interesting selection of the afternoon, however, was Vieaux’s rendition of his own 2020 composition “Home.” This piece had two entirely different sets of ideas going on throughout. One was wistful but reassuring; the other was decidedly uncomfrotable. A stream of needle-like, radio-like, tiny prickling high notes flowed over a solid foundation of congenial, secure harmony. These counterpointed ideas strongly implied the ambiguity of the titular place, hinting at an experience in which the object of longing, a source of rest and restfulness, is disturbed by the little tensions that protrude from it, and additionally implying the tragedy of the technical, digital modern opposing the reassurance of tradition. Structurally, the piece was at the opposite end of the musical spectrum from the coruscating display of complexity in the Bach. It also gave Vieaux a chance to captivate the crowd with an almost effortless playing style that appeared to involve nothing but flexing his right hand hypnotically over the guitar’s body, his left hand hardly moving as he tickled and teased the music from the instrument, somehow producing all of those impossibly small notes in their disturbing clarity.
“Thank you all for coming back to Chamber Music in the Arctic!” artistic director Nick Canellakis greeted the audience after intermission, alluding to SPAC’s unusual degree of frigidity, even for SPAC, that afternoon. He predicted the auditorium might warm up to normal temperatures by the time the concert was over. It didn’t.
Nevertheless, Vieaux persevered with Pat Metheny’s “Four Paths of Light,” a work written for him by the noted jazz guitarist, and one that he had waited five years to perform after Metheny proposed it, the composer having warned him that the score might just randomly show up in the mail one day. The first movement was easily the most intriguing, a Cubist fall down a staircase with an underlying melodiousness that kept it from actually falling apart. Reminiscent of the work of Michael Nyman and Philip Glass, it invited the listener to get lost in unpicking all the ideas involved. The second movement was much more subdued, more like a quiet evening by the fireside — perhaps the light here was firelight — and numerous false endings imitating the sudden crash at the end of the previous section. While stylistically rich and smooth, the third movement couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be, but the fourth movement had decided it was the jealous nineteenth-century guardian of a young heiress, and the light had become the ominous light of an English winter, peeking through bare tree limbs before dying away in more waves of minimalism.
“I had never really encountered anything quite that difficult before,” Vieaux said of his experience recording the Metheny piece, and added that when he had asked the composer if he himself could play it, Metheny had responded, “No, I wrote it for you!”
Next up was a piece that Bach was in fact known to have written for lute, the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E Flat Major. A refined opening in which moments of pleasant charm like a creekside walk in summer alternated with meditative foreboding yielded to greater elegance in the second movement. Vieaux threw in a few accents that would likely have made that old Lutheran jump along the way, while the concluding allegro was simply fun, sparkling, chipper and amusing. Just like that, Vieaux then vaulted over the centuries to take his listeners to a party at Princess Dala’s with Jorge Morel’s “Danza Brasilera,” vigorous mid-century dance music, short and fast with some good whacks on the guitar and a big riff at the end. Reflecting popular demand, Vieaux finished with a seasonal encore, starting with “Christmas Time is Here” from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” before seguing into Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song.”
Tune in again next month, same time, same place — and hopefully not the same temperature — on Sunday, Jan. 12, when Chamber Music Sedona will present clarinetist David Shifrin in concert with the Miró Quartet.
