Galbraith Shows Intensity on Strings

Paul Galbraith is the most meticulous of guitarists, and one of the more thoughtful. These qualities stood him in good stead Monday evening at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, where he gave a recital rich in complex and intricately detailed music for the Jose Iturbi Gold Medal series.

Galbraith has been developing his unique instrumental apparatus--an unusual eight-string guitar played like a plucked cello, replete with endpin, over a large resonating box--for more than a decade, but he came to broad attention only two years ago with the release of his almost devotional recorded version of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin. The second half of the program here was devoted to his arrangements of two of Bach’s major works for lute.

The Scottish guitarist is something of a mystic, and he probed the darkly braided C-minor Partita (transposed) with an intense, cleanly articulated inner vision. He did not open up much, however, with the far more extroverted Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, leaving it underwhelmingly placid.

Though he misses no nuance of touch and timbre, from the most liquid of glides to the most crisp trills, Galbraith seems more interested in architectural relationships and in spiritual underpinnings than in details of execution. His technique is such that he can assume the notes will be in place, freeing him to pursue simultaneously inward fantasy and external logic.

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Music that lives more in the moment seems less congenial. Although Galbraith is no stranger to Brazilian music, his way with a group of four familiar pieces by Villa-Lobos sounded aloof and astylistic. He may have intended to slice away some of the mannerisms of accrued tradition, but emotional rhetoric and the sheer sensual joy of playing are central to this music and were sadly missed.

Galbraith opened with a brace of Dowland lute pieces, gracefully done. He closed the first half with a Haydn keyboard sonata of carefully sculpted perspective, vastly affecting in the Adagio and rather less fun than expected elsewhere. His lyrical encores were Chopin’s B-minor Mazurka from Opus 33, a Catalan folk song, and Debussy’s “Girl with Flaxen Hair.”