Music Review : Guitar-Playing Romero Family Strings Audience Along

Much of the magic has gone out of recent concerts by the guitar-playing Romeros.

Predictable patterns are emerging. Out of the vast literature created for the instrument, the famous foursome--father Celedonio and sons Celin, Pepe and Angel--continues to avoid music written for the guitar, offering instead, as they did Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, an overwhelming number of dubious transcriptions.

Admittedly, finding repertory for four guitarists is a problem, but with their usual distribution of solos and duets, why program guitars imitating a string trio (Vivaldi’s Concerto in C), an orchestra (“Miller’s Dance” from Falla’s “Three-Cornered Hat”), operatic voices (“Carmen Suite”) and even, Lord help us, a harpsichord imitating a guitar (Scarlatti’s Sonata in E)?

Yet the original music they did choose--part of a Moreno Torroba Sonatina or Celedonio’s Fantasia--was forgettable.

Typically, solo work impressed more than did duets or ensembles, especially Pepe’s fluent, weightless flourishes in Mertz’s banal Hungarian Fantasy. But in his solo, Gaspar Sanz’s “Baroque Suite,” Angel had uncharacteristic trouble.

Even the appreciative Segerstrom Hall audience, which mustered applause after every section of the gimmicky “Carmen Suite” (with the matriarch of the family playing castanets), may have had some doubts. It only half ventured the almost obligatory standing ovation at the end. The quartet responded with a single encore, the final movement of Bach’s Third “Brandenburg” Concerto. But the applause died before the guitarists had left the stage.

One thing the concert did demonstrate, incidentally, was the sensitivity of the Segerstrom Hall acoustics.

No one had to be told that amplification was not used (although spokespersons confirmed the fact): The light guitar sound in the 3,000-seat hall necessitated riveted listening. A single cough could obliterate a passage.

Yet from the third balcony, Albeniz’s “Rumores del la caleta” (played by Celedonio and Pepe) sounded even more focused, nuanced and bright than had Scarlatti’s Sonata in E (played by Celin and Angel), heard from the mid-section of the orchestra. A well-kept secret may be emerging here.