Music : Yamashita Performs With Fury

Kazuhito Yamashita may not be all fingers and flash. But there were only fleeting indications of something else in the guitarist’s recital at Royce Hall Friday, delivered with all the power and impetuosity of a thunderstorm.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the heat and color and characteristic strength of Yamashita’s playing found its best expression in Takemitsu’s “Folios,” a work more often treated with allusive reserve. Yamashita projected it vividly, with a robust passion that the score supported with ear-opening ease.

But he framed his interesting program with Bach--the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, BWV 998 to open, and the sixth Cello Suite, BWV 1012 at the end. Stylistically innocent and brutally overplayed, Yamashita’s Bach was a thing of rhapsodic rushes and linear disintegration, and none too accurate.

This wayward, highly personal style worked to better effect in the character baubles of Tansman’s “Suite in Modo Polonico.” His evening-long problems with tuning disrupted the music at several points, but he also found some moments of lyric poise--idiosyncratically perfumed, to be sure--amid the technical slash-and-burn approach to clearing out notes.

Yamashita is best known in guitar circles for his unlikely, grandly eccentric transcriptions. He reminded us of that with the Largo from Dvorak’s “New World” symphony, in a typically volatile performance, bobbing and weaving both physically and musically.

The lone encore was a quiet, simple untitled folk-song setting, which drew uncommonly austere and affecting songfulness from the guitarist.