Gallardo del Rey: Dapper Guitarist

Jose Maria Gallardo del Rey is what you might call a guitarist’s guitarist.

His playing--as heard in the intimate Mission Theatre at the Multi-Cultural Music and Art Foundation in Northridge--is meticulous: articulation, fingering, tone and coloring all deliberately addressed with an ear for clarity, evenness and fluency. An impeccable execution of a given passage--everything in its place, carefully, studiously dispatched--seems his utmost concern.

Though he is a dapper player, he is never a cold one. In his recital of mostly Spanish music Saturday night, the young guitarist from Seville showed himself both a sensitive and inward musician. His slow tempos--actually, they sounded like the same one all evening--were strangely pulseless, a sort of amorphous moving-forward-by-default, as he lavished details, coaxed phrases, urged lines and backed off for nuance.

At the same time, his basic sonority was quasi- sul ponticello --that is, near the bridge--a nasal sound and odd choice, generally. This, as well as his other traits, makes the listener (made one listener) aware of the guitar, and what the musician was doing with it, first, the music second.

His program avoided the hackneyed. It included a Sonata by one M. Castillo (there were no program notes), three pieces by Falla and in transcriptions by Gallardo del Rey, the Toccata in the Style of Corelli by S. de Murcia, some Spanish dances by Sanz and “Winter-Summer” from “Dos Estaciones Portenas” by Piazzolla.

Three of his own compositions concluded the event, the well- crafted, tonal, resourceful and Spanish-idiom “Noches de San Lorenzo” and “Rosales,” and the sweet and buoyant “In Memoriam Django Reinhardt,” which used a theme and styles of that gypsy/jazz guitarist.