Music Reviews : York Guitar Program at Ambassador

Composer-guitarist Andrew York claims a variety of influences on his music. But the results, as heard in abundance at Ambassador Auditorium, are disappointingly one-dimensional.

To be sure, some of the 20 character pieces and etudes that he presented Monday were jazzier than others, some more overtly neo-Renaissance. He even included a “Chilean Dance,” although its ethnic allusions were slender.

But a generic fusion style subsumed everything. The size of the sampling merely seemed to prove that John Williams had culled the best for his “Music of the Americas” recording: the faintly bluesy, lyrically subtle Lullaby, and “Sunburst,” the most energetic and rhythmically complex of the lot, which York played on a steel-string instrument.

York is a fluent, amiable and technically secure performer. He exploits very little of the timbral resources of the guitar, however, beyond the occasional harmonic or two. His most distinctive sounds came in the rich, darkly colored Bagatelle variations, and the grittier, hammered tensions of “Emergence.”

The young musician also included a few arrangements and transcriptions, of which Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus & Lucy” proved virtually a prototype for much of York’s own book. He delivered two Dowland pieces with characterful zest, including his own embellishments.