Perfection ought seldom if ever be used in describing a musical performance, but it certainly applies to every aspect of this delightful disc: interpretation, technical mastery, programming, and sound. Of course recitals featuring these two seminal composers for the guitar abound, and there’s certainly no shortage of fine guitarists on disc. Few, however, combine David Starobin’s supreme command of his instrument with a genuine talent for making records, a gift that makes his own carefully planned discs much more than the mere sum of their parts. Here is a typical case in point.
The disc begins and ends with Irish and Scottish folk-song settings by Mauro Giuliani, the result of the same early-19th-century enthusiasm that led Haydn and Beethoven to make hundreds of such arrangements. After the first, Garyowen, comes a sequence of choice items by Fernando Sor: Five Short Pieces (assembled from various collections) primarily of dance-like or lyric character; the larger-scaled three-movement Fantaisie Op. 58; and then six etudes (or “lessons”), appealing works that, like Chopin’s, conceal their technical challenges beneath a winning musical surface. The major piece consists of Giuliani’s Twelve Waltzes Op. 57, which, when played as a single unit (as the composer intended), provides a brilliant crescendo of excitement and virtuosity. Giuliani’s extended setting of The Blue Bells of Scotland makes an ideal encore.
Several factors keep this recital from fragmenting into a series of otherwise inconsequential bagatelles. First, there’s the musical quality of the selections themselves, chosen to maximize melodic, rhythmic, and tonal variety. The two minuets featured in Sor’s Five Short Pieces, for example, explore some tangy minor keys, contrast well both with each other and the music that surrounds them, and never tire the ear with monotonous phrasing. Giuliani’s Twelve Waltzes also offer a welcome range of major and minor tonalities and an irresistible rhythmic sweep. Starobin projects all of the dance music with unfailing buoyancy and zest while triumphantly overcoming his instrument’s inherent limitations through the seamless legato phrasing he brings to the more lyrical and intimate moments (the Fantaisie’s central Andante, for example, and several of the Lessons, happily included more for their poetry than their naked virtuosity). It’s all captured in glowing, richly resonant sound that gives the guitar a real tactile presence without the distraction of excessive performance noises. If this isn’t perfect, then nothing is.
