Fisk Embellishes Classical Guitar

Eliot Fisk

at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Classical guitarist Eliot Fisk's recital at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Sunday featured a slew of technically challenging if not particularly expressive guitar works and transcriptions.

An avid proponent of new music, Fisk brought works ranging from Scarlatti to Rochberg to his program. In doing so, he demonstrated the guitar's unique position as a middle ground between the harpsichord and the violin; the guitar's strings are plucked like the harpsichord's, but it has a fingerboard like a violin. As a result, classical guitarists can create a wide variety of effects culled from the repertoires of both instruments.

In the Fantasia-Sevilliana by Joaquin Turina, Fisk's instrument immediately filled the Gardner's tapestried concert hall with its booming sound. The Turina, a work from this century, evokes traditional images of bull-fighting and Spanish dancing. Luigi Boccherini carried these ideas back to Italy more than a century before with his own guitar works.

While one of Boccherini's guitar quintets features castanets, Turina calls for percussive sounds created by tapping the face of the instrument. Fisk later extended the guitar's percussive role in his transcription of de Falla's Danza del Molinero from "El Sombrero de Tres Picos"; by adding a strummed tone to his tapping, Fisk achieved a startlingly bell-like effect. He also created ringing harmonics by manipulating the resonant lengths of the strings.

Throughout four Scarlatti keyboard sonatas (in D Major, G Major, E minor and A Major), Fisk's concentration on the fingerboard and frets never lapsed. He did take some liberty with the first two sonatas by allowing for dynamic contrasts and a ringing bass line that would be impossible on a harpsichord. Fisk might have expanded these liberties to include a thinning of the sonatas' ornamentation, whose technical difficulty sometimes weighed down his otherwise ebullient accounts. In the E minor sonata, Fisk allowed himself to be tossed easily between its simple lines with more delicacy than one would expect from a harpsichord. The last sonata betrayed some intonational problems but still achieved a lightness of declamation that a harpsichord could not match.

"The whole piece sort of works towards the grand finale," Fisk said to introduce Mauro Giuliani's Rossiniana No. 1. Indeed, this setting of themes primarily drawn from 'Italiana in Algiri., fraught with acrobatics through which Fisk easily maneuvered, spent a third of its time reaching a long-sought conclusion. Though it resisted breaking into opera for the most part, the Giuliani did finally have the chance to simulate a Rossiniesque stampeding finale on the guitar.

Selections from George Rochberg's "American Bouquet" offered a completely different view of the guitar's capabilities. His adaptations of "My Heart Stood Still" and "I Only Have Eyes for You" lent an improvisatory, introspective tone to the guitar; it was much like viewing the old melodies through a kaleidoscope. Fisk would have done well to lose himself a little more in the ideas of these pieces, rather than focusing significantly on embellishment. He executed the last selection, a genuine if overly scripted "Notre Dame Blues," With appropriate gusto, smiling visibly for the first time while playing. Perhaps he was considering the incongruity of Rochberg's brand of smokestack lightning--replete with twangs and even a couple of slides--amidst the Gardner's 15th century surroundings.

Fisk rounded out the program with another short and mystically impressionistic de Falla transcription ("Homenaje Pour le Tombeau de Debussy"), and a clearly well-rehearsed 24th Caprice of Paginini. Here, transcribed pizzacati, though sometimes lacking in volume, were remarkably distinguishable from regularly bowed notes. As an encore, Fisk offered a similarly effortless and energetic rendition of Julio Segruras' "El Colibri."