MUSIC REVIEW : Works From the Cultural Crossroads

When a musician like guitarist Carlos Barbosa-Lima brings to the stage an accessible program of music by Latin American composers and such U.S. stalwarts as George Gershwin, Scott Joplin and Dave Brubeck, as he did in recital at the Ambassador Auditorium Wednesday, there is much more than a crowd-pleasing crossover strategy at work.

The accomplished Brazilian musician comes to the business of diversity honestly, almost as a matter of cultural birthright, Brazil having been a critical musical crossroads in this century. Barbosa-Lima’s recital gracefully supported the melting pot theory, from the myriad influences in the music itself to the transforming hand of the guitarist’s arrangements, on more than half the pieces.

Barbosa-Lima struck a balance of intimacy and potency in the atmospherically correct, acoustically friendly space of the Ambassador. Lustrous maturity shines through his playing, with his relaxed technical virtuosity and refined sense of tonal color.

Included were two pieces by Los Angeles-based, Brazilian-born guitarist Laurindo Almeida, who also seems qualmless about blending jazz and classical ideas. Oddly, Barbosa-Lima avoided the most prominent, and most guitaristic Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, leaning instead toward such lesser-known but compelling music by Augustin Barrios and Alfredo Vianna, whose Brazilian “choros” segued smoothly and logically into the Joplin’s ragtime cadences.

Pianist Patricia Griggs joined the guitarist for Radames Gnattali’s Sonatina No. 1 for Guitar and Piano, a marriage--and not always an easy one--of “serious” and vernacular music. The remainder of the second half included music by Gershwin, including an especially delicate and ravishing Prelude No. 2, Brubeck, and songs by bossa nova pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Even with Jobim, whose music has been heard and diluted in too many of the world’s cocktail lounges, Barbosa-Lima brought integrity and elaboration to bear. Crossover, where is thy sting?