MUSIC REVIEW : SOLOS SHINE AMID ROMEROS’ BALLADS

Los Romeros, the familiar guitar quartet composed of three brothers and the paterfamilias of the Romero family, inaugurated the Lyceum Stage as a classical music venue Monday night.

With the smell of fresh paint still lingering in the lobby, loyal patrons of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society gathered for the final program of the society’s downtown chamber music series. Had construction schedules not been regularly delayed, the society would have staged most of this season’s downtown series in the subterranean Horton Plaza theater.

For this inaugural event, Los Romeros provided a popular musical confection. The new address, however, inspired no new music, just the perennial Hispanic favorites: Albeniz, Tarrega, Falla and, of course, that honorary Spaniard, Bizet. The sold-out house amply demonstrated its approval of both the performers and their ingratiating program.

While the modest dynamic range of a guitar quartet could not be expected to test the gamut of the Lyceum Stage’s musical acoustics, the concert demonstrated that the room is not hostile to music. The theater’s high ceiling and generous proportions of its thrust stage welcomed the performers, even if the abstract, angular set from “Quilters” made entering and exiting a daunting gymnastic feat. For the quartet’s performance, the room seemed a bit dry, robbing the ensemble of some resonance in its more ebullient passages. For the soloist, however, the clarity of the room and the proximity of the performer to the audience were definite benefits.

With the guitar, it may be said that less is usually more. In Monday’s concert, the most musically arresting moments came in the solos, not in the ensemble pieces. Celin Romero’s introspective, lyrical interpretation of Hector Villalobos’ Prelude No. 1 and Pepe Romero’s subtly shaped “Cordoba” by Albeniz made the most telling statements of the evening, although brother Angel’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” by Tarrega seemed perfunctory.

Some of the ensemble pieces were simply poor choices for transcription; for example, the Telemann Concerto for Four Violins and a set of Michael Praetorius lute dances. Genial dance movements and ballads by Jimenez, Breton and Celedonio Romero evaporated with the same nonchalance as they were played. Bizet’s “Carmen” Suite, complete with matriarch Angelita Romero providing obbligato castanets, only served to bring to mind more colorful orchestral transcriptions of the opera’s tuneful highlights.

The solos focused the musical attention of the audience, while most of the ensemble works diffused collective concentration both on stage and in the audience. Symbolic of this ensemble boredom was Celin Romero, who frequently rested his chin on the edge of his guitar while dutifully plucking bass notes.

The final movement of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, offered as an encore, explored the more challenging possibilities of a guitar quartet, with each guitar adding an indispensable thread of the contrapuntal tonal tapestry. More Bach might have stirred the audience from the musical torpor of all those predictable Spanish ballads.