Galbraith Makes Most of Guitar’s Expanded Range

Guitar virtuoso Paul Galbraith has been on the scene long enough that we should be accustomed to his unusual presentation, yet it’s still a sight for startled eyes.

Galbraith plays a custom eight-string instrument, with extra strings on either side of the traditional six, and creates smart arrangements taking advantage of the added range. In addition, he plays it upright, like a shrunken cello, with its spike grounded on a fanciful wooden sound box to enrich the sound output.

This is not your father’s classical guitar. Close your eyes, though, and what impresses most is the simple fact of his musical mastery, amply evident at USC’s Newman Recital Hall on Friday. It was not a flawless performance, with a few more mis-frettings and tentative sounds than expected, perhaps the result of a USC audience teeming with guitarists, of the professional and student variety. Galbraith was actually more relaxed and flowing at the previous night’s recital at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Glitches, though, couldn’t detract Friday from the quiet intensity and focus of Galbraith’s performance.

His instrument’s expanded range is well-suited to adaptations of keyboard music, as he showed in his assured reading of the concert opener, Bach’s “French Suite” No. 2 in C minor (transposed to the guitar-friendly key of E minor), and Enrique Granados’ “Valses Poeticos,” its mellifluous lines reaching up into unexpected, airy heights.

Other more guitaristic treats on the program included the most contemporary work, English composer Lennox Berkeley’s alternately sweet and lightly sour Sonatina Opus 51 (written for Julian Bream), and Jacques Ibert’s effervescent and mischievous “Francaise.”

Galbraith closed with an ear-opening arrangement of Debussy’s “Children’s Corner,” its lyrical, Impressionistic palette ideally refitted to the guitar, or at least to this oddly logical guitar, and this commanding guitarist’s hands.