Music Reviews : Benjamin Verdery Plays the Ambassador

The guitar is a locus for some of the liveliest and most varied new music going. Of course, you may respond, it has to be--few other instruments have such screaming repertory needs.

It is also an instrument that has preserved the tradition of performer-composers. All these facets came together in Benjamin Verdery’s recital Monday on the Ambassador Auditorium Gold Medal series.

Verdery closed his program with excerpts from his own “Some Towns and Cities,” a strong collection of transfigured pop evocations in a variety of traditional styles. The nine pieces offered here, including the lone encore, ranged from the softly liquid “Mobile, AL”--with Verdery providing caressive bottleneck work on a 12-string instrument--to the frenetic bop suggestions of “New York, NY.”

The guitarist played with generous sound and spirit. His equally stylish and articulate partner in the final four guitar duos was local hero Scott Tennant.

Now if only Verdery had been as confident in the music of others. He opened with three recent pieces written for him--and recorded by him--but in soft-grained, technically troubled readings that seemed to miss connection with his audience.

David Leisner’s desultory Prelude was barely audible at times. Verdery began Roberto Sierra’s “Toccata y Lamento”--a pungent, high-voltage tribute to Villa-Lobos--with the lights up and late-comers still filing in, and he fumbled much of the early going. He stopped to adjust his position between the movements of Anthony Newman’s expressive “Ride the Wind Horse,” encouraging the audience to break up the piece with polite applause, and then he fizzled again in the Presto bravura.

For the rest of his agenda, Verdery turned to the most frequently--and successfully--mined sources for guitar transcriptions, Bach and Albeniz. He offered a fluid, highly poetic and out-of-tune account of Bach’s Cello Suite in D, BWV 1012. From the Spanish pianist came a driven, exaggerated but technically deft “Torre Bermeja” and a beautifully hushed, also out-of-tune “Cordoba.”