Six months ago, guitarist and lutenist Timothy Burris took delivery of a new guitar that he has wanted to show off ever since. He had hoped to introduce it last spring, but rescheduled the concert when the guitar arrived too late for him to properly get the feel of it. But when he played it Saturday evening in the chapel of St. Luke’s Cathedral in Portland – in a concert by Music’s Quill in which Burris collaborated with the tenor Timothy Neill Johnson – you could see what all the fuss was about.
The instrument, built for Burris by Canadian luthier Richard Berg, is a copy of a guitar built in 1864 by Antonio Torres, the greatest Spanish guitar maker of his time. It is not just any old Torres. Known to guitar historians as FE17, the guitar that Berg copied was used by the guitarist-composer Francisco Tárrega from 1869 to 1889, when constant use rendered it unplayable. Tárrega replaced it with another Torres, but he regarded the first as his favorite.
Like most guitars of its vintage, this model has a smaller body than the modern Spanish guitar, but Burris drew a surprisingly large, warm tone from it, a sound magnified beautifully by the chapel’s resonant acoustics.
Perhaps because the concert was part of Burris’ Portland Early Music series, Burris did not play any of the music Tárrega composed on the instrument. But if the point of the early music movement is to perform works on the instruments they were written for (or modern copies), you could not be more on target than to play Tárrega on this Torres-Berg guitar.
Instead, Burris opened the program with a Sarabande, a Menuet and a Passacaille from “Livre de Piéces pour la Guitare,” a 1686 collection by Robert de Visée, a court guitarist and lutenist to Louis XIV and Louis XV. You might raise an eyebrow. These dances, after all, were published nearly two centuries before Torres built FE17, and were composed for the even smaller Baroque guitar, which had five double strings, with one pair tuned to octaves.
You could rationalize Burris’ choice. Emilio Pujol, a Tárrega student with an antiquarian bent, published arrangements of several of Visée’s dances, so there is a connection. More to the point, Burris’ expertise in Baroque performance served these pieces well, with generous ornamentation, vigorous accenting in the Menuet and touches like the pianissimo upward strum in the Passacaille, all evoking the French Baroque style.
Burris demonstrated the flexibility of the instrument’s dynamics – as well as his own deftness at making melody lines ring out clearly over busy accompaniments, as if they were played on a second instrument – in expressive, shapely renderings of the “Marche Funèbre” from Fernando Sor’s 1836 “Fantaisie Élégiaque” (Op. 59), and a familiar Sor study, “Lesson No. 23” (from Op. 31, 1828).
Sor, a Spanish composer who worked mostly in Paris, was one of the most formidable guitarist-composers of his day, matched (and in some ways bettered) only by Mauro Giuliani, an Italian composer who spent the main years of his career in Vienna. Both were represented here by groups of rarely heard songs, which benefited from Johnson’s lithe tone and commanding sense of style.
The Sor set included six Seguidillas, composed between 1800 and 1808 and steeped in a Spanish sensibility, with lovelorn emotionalism offset by gentle humor. Giuliani’s “Six Songs” (Op. 89), published around 1817, are cast as they were in a Viennese style, which Giuliani assimilated so fully that you could be forgiven for mistaking his graceful, sometimes dramatic songs for Schubert.
Johnson and Burris also performed four French songs from “Premier Recueil d’Airs Choises,” a 1762 collection by a composer identified only as “Mr. Godard.” These have some appealingly peculiar touches – the sudden leaps into the tenor’s top range, in “Menuet de M. Valois,” for example, or the contest between extroversion and subtlety in “Ah, le Charmant Berger” – as well as elegant guitar accompaniments.
You could quibble that the Berg-Torres was out of its era for much of the program, but the effect Burris created was magical. Still, I would love to hear Burris devote a recital on this magnificent instrument to music by Tárrega and his contemporaries.
The Portland Early Music Festival, which Timothy Burris directs, runs from Oct. 28 to 30, with concerts at St. Luke’s Cathedral and the Woodfords Congregational Church in Portland. The next Music’s Quill concert in Portland is “A Baroque Christmas,” at St. Luke’s Cathedral on Dec. 3.
Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and culture writer for The New York Times who lives in Portland. He can be contacted at:
allankozinn@gmail.com
Twitter: kozinn
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