The seven concerts that filled the second half of Dublin Guitar Week offered such a national diversity that it was hard to choose which to attend. Should it be French, Portuguese, Spanish, Mexican, Irish or Italian? Or concerts that held promise of the unusual?
Arrangements of Concerto in G for two mandolins and strings, of Concerto Grosso in G minor, both by Vivaldi, and of Bach's Brandenburg No 3 were unusually ambitious. The performances by Le Trio de Guitares de Paris were tours de force, if only for the number of notes to be shared between three instruments - but surely all that skill and effort would have been better employed in something more off the beaten track? The dances from Falla's El Amor Brujo and La Viola Breve were equally well done but over-familiar; much more interesting were the pieces by Django Reinhardt. Only here did it seem that the guitars were performing not a conjuring trick but music that sprang from the nature of the instruments. One could have done with more of this swing.
The next day, Friday, the player-composer Joaquim d'Azurem played his own compositions on the Portuguese guitar. This instrument, circular in shape and without a waist, has a sound something between a bouzouki and a sitar, though as it was (unnecessarily) amplified, it was hard to detect its authentic timbre beneath the booming and the jangling. The pieces had suggestive titles such as Dream of a Train, Butterfly, Through the Window, and Distant Lives, but despite such variety of title they were all dishearteningly similar. After promisingly improvisatory openings, they fell into mechanical rhythms unillumined by any sustained melodic invention or harmonic adventure. Once one had got used to the exotic sound it became boring, suitable for a Portuguese cocktail-bar perhaps, but not for an hour's attentive listening.
The name of the composer Silvius Leopoldo Weiss (16861750) is well known. He was the last of the lutenists but because of the scarcity of lute players he is most often heard in transcriptions for the guitar. On Saturday there was the rare delight of hearing a Sonata, a Capriccio, and a Prelude, Toccata and Fugue played on the baroque lute by Richard Sweeney. The lute, with its gut strings, has a narrower dynamic range than the guitar, but in the right hands this is no disadvantage. The intimate quality of the sound means the performer cannot overwhelm the listener but must woo him or her and this is what Richard Sweeney did, with the requisite finesse. The music speaks privately to each listener without overdone emphasis or any crowd-catching tricks.
On Sunday, Alan Grundy revealed some of the recent discoveries in the library of the RIAM. A cache of some 2,000 pieces for guitar had been turned up. Collected by Josiah Andrew Hudleston (1799-1865) and presented by his widow, it appears to have been put together for the most part during his 30 years in the Indian civil service. A fanatical amateur, he must have whiled away many a torrid night with works by Pratten, Horetsky, Nuske and others. Alan Grundy played pieces by these composers, all steeped in the nostalgia of a bygone Victorian age, including one by Hudleston himself - his only published piece - and for good measure an Introduction and Nocturne in A, Grundy's own "tribute to Hudleston in a 19th century style".
It was a graceful and accomplished exercise in a Chopinesque manner. After such a hypnotic succession of salon music, Grundy brought us back to the very end of the 20th century with the first performance of The Millennium Mirror, which made striking use of avant-garde techniques. Looking back on the millennium in one's mental mirror is a salutary experience.
