MUSIC REVIEWS : Guitarist Parkening Tunes In at Cerritos

Apologizing for a 10-degree temperature difference between the backstage area and the limelight that meant retuning his guitar every time he walked on stage, a soft-spoken Christopher Parkening amiably won over an enthusiastic audience Friday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Of course, his fine playing, at times assisted by guitarist David Brandon, of a program largely identical to one the two gave at Ambassador Auditorium in 1992, didn’t hurt.

Earlier music, however, found Parkening more idiosyncratic and less musical in interpretation than in works of this century.

Addressing Bach in the first preludes of the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Cello Suite No. 1 and in “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Parkening emphasized facile finger work and rhythmic drive at the expense of song and drama. In works by Praetorius, Dowland and good old Anonymous, he allowed himself occasional moments of odd rubato and gear-shifting.

Nonetheless, he often drew from a palette of attractive, subtle colors, of which he continued to make use in Giuliani’s Variations on a Theme of Handel and in the pieces that followed intermission.

Here, amid fluidly played, rhythmically demanding works by Granados, Alexandre Tansman, Albeniz and other composers, Parkening proved perhaps most compelling in his introspective and relaxed phrasing in Villa-Lobos’ Prelude No. 3 and his intense focus in that composer’s Etude No. 11.

Responding to cheers, Parkening and Brandon played an excerpt from Falla’s “La Vida Breve,” and, by himself, Parkening played a canario by Gaspar Sanz and a Catalonian lullaby, as encores.