MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : Guitarist Teicholz Closes Gold Medal Series

A tough, imaginative, stylistically varied program formed a comprehensive introduction to guitarist Marc Teicholz Monday, closing the Gold Medal series at Ambassador Auditorium.

The Yale-trained musician included the lure of two pieces by locally based composers, Robert Mayeur of Valley College and Dusan Bogdanovic of the Falla Guitar Trio. Mayeur’s 1990 “Polynuance,” written for Teicholz, proved an attractive, athletic fret-board workout, conservative but not cliched.

Bogdanovic’s Sonata No. 2, from 1985, is a typically characterful, syncretic effort. It challenges not just technique, but interpretive integration as well.

Teicholz played both with fluent skill. He works with a huge dynamic range, and seems obsessed with timbral and coloristic variation to the point of overloaded fuss. All the niggling changes of touch and tone within phrases compromised the real power of the larger contrasts.

Five selections from Hector Angulo’s “Cantos Yoruba de Cuba,” low-impact exercises in soft-grained folkloricism, made better vehicles for Teicholz’s explorations of the guitar’s sonic possibilities.

A nice sense of curiosity and adventure was also apparent in Teicholz’s older repertory. He did bracket the program with standards--Sor’s “Magic Flute” Variations, and Turina’s Fandanguillo and Sevillana--and memory lapses, quickly covered.

But his biggest piece was a daunting adaptation of Bach’s keyboard Partita No. 1, BWV 825. Tuning, a problem throughout the first half, particularly plagued him, but he surmounted the distraction with mechanically solid, pertinently ornamented playing.

A highly personal account of Rodrigo’s “Zarabanda lejana” prefaced the Bach. Nikita Koshkin’s programmatic “Usher Waltz” completed the printed agenda. In encore Teicholz offered a gentle Cuban lullaby.