Geoffrey Morris And Siobhan Stagg + Special Guests Guitarissimo – Adelaide International Guitar Festival Review

Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, Sat Jul 19 This session opened with Guitarissimo: a series of cameo performances from students from Adelaide University's Elder Conservatorium of Music. The first nervously played piece was useful for demonstrating the difference between classical and flamenco guitar. Two premieres of original music followed, one of them written by Cory Davis. Davis we were told also plays in a metal band – wonderful to see a young musician embracing the broad spectrum of what the study of guitar can offer. And that spectrum is very broad! The student set concluded with a really clever and catchy ensemble piece that explores the sound of the African thumb piano or Kalimba (also known as the Mbira). This was a good example of how a guitar ensemble can produce sounds that are quite different from what one normally expects from a classical guitar. After the break came the main event, beginning with Geoffrey Morris playing exquisite instrumental pieces on baroque guitar with a beautiful light touch. He was then joined by the delightful Siobhan Stagg on vocals in a series of songs written for guitar and voice, and featuring various early forms of the guitar. I found the first few pieces a little too operatic for my taste, though Stagg’s technique was clearly superb. And such was the power of her singing that the delicate guitar arrangements became a point of secondary focus, and I found that disappointing. Still, the audience appreciated Stagg’s summaries of the subject matter of her songs – predictably, just variations on the theme of love – but as the performance progressed to songs from later periods they moved into light opera territory and became more accessible to my more modern ear. Stagg herself seemed to relax more into the role of a musical storyteller in these later pieces, and became more vivacious, even quite coquettish. These later pieces were composed by Federico Moretti (1765-1838), and Vincente Martin Y Soler (1754-1806). We learned that Martin Y Soler was a rival of Mozart’s in the musical popularity stakes in the Vienna of the time. The Martin piece featured here was in fact the first song cycle ever written for guitar. A thoroughly charming performance; it was interesting to learn that songs have been written for human voice from as early as the 17th century, and that writing love songs on the guitar is a long and well-established tradition. by Michael Coghlan