MUSIC REVIEWS : Williams Shows His Technical Mastery

Effortless precision: It seems to thrill a lot of people.

Guitarist John Williams displayed it in abundance before a packed Ambassador Auditorium Wednesday, in the first of his two recitals there on successive nights. And he allowed nothing to disturb the calm surface created by his technical mastery.

The music was never clogged with the demands of effort, never troubled with rhythmic stress or harmonic pull, never flexed with the curved tension of an extended phrase. Calm fluidity ruled the waves, but this was a shallow ocean. The Australian guitarist, dressed in rugby tee and corduroys, revealed a mellowness that wouldn’t have disrupted a dinner conversation.

With the considerable aid of some unsubtle but warm and detailed amplification, Williams was able to project a myriad of color and articulation and to take on the most demanding technical passages with an unperturbed and quiet polish. Not once all evening did he play a passage at a true forte--that is, what would have been a forte without the miking.

The West Coast premiere of Peter Sculthorpe’s 10-minute “From Kakadu,” a singularly tame and tonal work from this often adventurous composer, served as his centerpiece. Its four brief movements speak with a folksy and repetitive simplicity, slowly turning over ideas as if rays of light in a prism.

The rest of the first half featured Williams’ transcriptions of a Vivaldi Concerto (Opus 3, No. 9) and six Scarlatti sonatas, played with little regard for the niceties of phrasing. The entire second half was devoted to the minor pleasantries of Paraguayan guitarist-composer Augustin Barrios Mangore’s short pieces, which provided all the shimmering tremolos, pretty harmonics, showy intimacies and carefree tunes required.