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Falla, Albéniz, C. Romero, and García Lorca:   Eliot Fisk and Angel Romero, guitars, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 25.11.2008 (BJ)


There were at least three programs for this one-evening two-guitar festival in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall. The originally announced mix of works by Spanish and Italian composers was replaced, in the printed program book, by an all-Spanish anthology, and this morphed in the event into a slightly different sequence of Spanish pieces framed between arrangements of Falla and García Lorca.

In the light of who was playing, few listeners could have felt any disappointment as this all-Spanish turn of events. Angel Romero, born in Málaga, is the youngest son of Celedonio Romero, and played alongside him for years in the family’s famous guitar quartet. Very different in his origins–he was born in Philadelphia–Eliot Fisk ranks virtually as a Spaniard by osmosis: he studied with Segovia, and lives part of the time in Granada with his Spanish wife and their daughter.

Certainly the two men’s collaboration suggests no trace of national disparity, unless to call Romero’s playing more mercurial and Fisk’s more tellingly focused on structural unity might hint at any such ethnic contrast. In any case, Fisk’s two-guitar arrangements of Falla’s Seven Spanish Folk Songs and of seven of the Old Spanish Songs originally collected and set by the poet Federico García Lorca afforded them an opportunity, seized with enormous gusto and charm, to combine their talents in the most winning way imaginable. This was playing that blended the obviously Iberian, and often touchingly wistful, elements in the music with a brilliance and sheer élan that allied it with all good music from anywhere. As Vaughan Williams observed, the way for a composer to achieve universality is not by aping fashionable cosmopolitan trends, but rather by identifying himself with his own national roots.

Separately, Romero offered poetic interpretations of two of his father’s compositions, and Fisk transfixed the audience with his arrangements of piano pieces by Albéniz, thrown off with the kind of virtuosity that transcends mere technique. But as pleasurable as anything was the two musicians’ obviously warm rapport, evident no less in their occasional exchange of friendly verbal digs than in the duet encore–Francisco Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra–that sent us home with our toes tapping.

Bernard Jacobson


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