Music Reviews : Guitarist Frauchi in U.S. Debut at Caltech

Alexander Frauchi’s on-again, off-again appearance--plagued by visa problems--at the Guitar Foundation of America 1990 International Guitar Festival had the assembled aficionados on an emotional roller coaster even before the Soviet guitarist made his North American debut Thursday.

His short, tough, much-emended program threatened to continue the pattern of anticipation and disappointment, before finally settling into unalloyed triumph.

The 36-year-old musician turned things around after intermission. The Variations on a Russian folk song by one Mikhail Vyssotsky are not much in themselves--attractively melancholic, like a sort of Slavic Barrios--but they sparked a fluid, pertinent performance where before Frauchi had been nervously fussy and labored.

Frauchi then turned to Nikita Koshkin’s “Usher Waltz” and two movements from “The Prince’s Toys” with controlled power and musical assurance. He integrated the coloristic devices tellingly, and captured Koshkin’s peculiar blend of sass and sentiment perfectly.

“Tango en Skai,” by Roland Dyens, drew wonderfully lithe, insinuating playing from Frauchi. His sensual phrasing stretched and bent without losing its kinetic connections, and his tone was remarkably liquid, with nary a stressed shift.

The strength of Frauchi’s technique was never in doubt, but earlier it was applied in effortful, stylistically skewed interpretations. He opened the concert with a slow, highly romanticized version of Frescobaldi’s “Aria con Variazioni,” much of it played at a nearly inaudible level, even for the hushed audience in the relatively intimate Ramo Auditorium at Caltech.

Frauchi has recorded the Bach Chaconne and Paganini’s Grand Sonata in A, in much more poised and articulate performances than he offered Thursday. He lavished timbral changes on both at the expense of coherent phrasing and hardly ever played more than four bars in the same tempo. He also had memory and technical lapses in the Paganini, played without the inconsequential violin accompaniment.

He ended with two bonbons, secure and charming.