THE FIRST two concerts in this year’s Guitar Festival of Ireland included the kind of event that can be gold dust for musical niche markets like this one.
It’s an event that serves the dual purpose of, on the one hand, preaching to the converted, and, on the other, demonstrating to everyone else the joys of what they’ve been missing.
Easier said than done, but it’s what Ireland’s leading guitarist John Feeley accomplished with his solo recital in the strange but adequate surroundings of Freemasons’ Hall in Dublin. Anyone new to the guitar, or to Bach, or to both, would surely have been captivated by Feeley’s own arrangement of Bach’s first
Solo Cello Suit
e. While devotees will have enjoyed features like his contrapuntal fidelity, the subtlety and authenticity of his second-time ornamentation, and the overarching presence of his unfailing technique, what must have won over everyone was the sheer sound and expressivity of a masterpiece played with such unerringly good musical instinct.
Feeley continued his all-Bach first-half with the famous
D minor Chaconne from the Violin Partita No 2,
again in his own arrangement. If his approach was flexible and subjective in the suite, here the
Chaconne
’s short repeating bass line engendered a steadier tread, with both styles sounding equally well, equally valid.
After the interval, Feeley opened with contemporary music, the 1998
Guitar Sonata No
2 by John Buckley, which by itself offered different aspects of Feeley’s expressive range. Although it’s a piece that sustains a single mood throughout, its four movements do so via very different characters: thoughtfulness in the first, rhythmic energy in the second and fourth, and a slow lament in the third, all communicated with great intensity.
He rounded off with his own tasteful settings of Irish tunes and, finally, the
Grande Ouverture Op 61
of Mauro Giuliani, like a classical orchestral movement bursting from a single guitar.
It was the kind of programme that festival director Alec O’Leary might well present himself, yet in the event he opted to share the festival’s opening concert in the John Field Room with the excellent ConTempo String Quartet. He was a fine soloist in Boccherini’s
Quintet No. 4
and in a
Lute Concerto in D
by Vivaldi, neither of which placed undue demands on O’Leary who rather filled the role of contented adjunct to his guests.
