Guitar Fest Plucks Many Styles From the Classics

Classical guitar has had a diminished, or at least scattered, presence in Southern California ever since the lamented closing of the Ambassador Auditorium, a world-class hall for guitar recitals. Have no fear: The instrument will prevail, and one sure place to find solid guitar exemplars is at the Summer Arts at Cal State Long Beach, where the annual education program kicked off its series of guitar and lute concerts on strong footing Tuesday night.

Although originally planned as a three-part program of two soloists and the duo of Julian Gray and Ronald Pearl, schedule shuffling kept David Taylor off the stage this night, allowing more substantial showings by the two remaining acts.

A familiar face on campus, the Bay Area-based Marc Teicholz is a fine player, both technically gifted and musical to the core. Here, he added to his set two movements of Bach’s second Violin Sonata in A Minor, fueling the music with drive and precision, if not introspection.

For modern measure, Marilyn Ziffrin’s Rhapsody offered exotic guitaristic effects and points of dissonance and tension along the path, taking advantage of the instrument’s peculiarities. Speaking of peculiarities, Teicholz also performed a transcription of Chopin’s “Vals,” its waltz-time joie de vivre surviving the translation nicely, thanks to his tonally nuanced reading, a few rough spots notwithstanding.

Baltimore-based Gray and Pearl live up to any duo’s standard of speaking-as-one, with a tight empathy and an appreciation of eclectic material. On this night, they veered from Brazilian composer Celso Machado’s sometimes inspired, sometimes stiff Latin-flavored, jazzy music, to seminal sounds by Handel and early guitar composer Fernando Sor.

Their most inviting sounds, however, came out of William Bland’s “Intrada and Sarabande,” written for the duo. Freely mixing influences of Bach, Spanish music and 20th century notions, this is guitar music about guitar music, but written with heart, and played here likewise. Concerts continue at Cal State Long Beach tonight and Wednesday and next Thursday.