Ricardo Cobo
        Walking on the Water

* Dyens:
        - Hommage a Villa-Lobos
        - L. B. Story (To Leonard Bernstein & Leo Brouwer)
* Pujol: Elegia por la Muerte de un Tanguero (Homenaje a Astor Piazzola)
* Sainz de la Maza: Homenaje a Toulouse-Lautrec
* Pereira: Pieces Bresiliennes
* Major: Burning Circle (To Keith Jarrett & R. Colavito)
* Cooperman: Walking on the Water (Homage to Jerzy Kosinsky)

Ricardo Cobo (guitar)
ESS.A.Y CD1073 Total time: 50:47

Summary for the Busy Executive: Stunning. Music by virtuosos for virtuosos.

During the Sixties, my sister saved up her pennies to buy a serious
guitar, so I had the opportunity to hear a beginning student close up.
Recently, she's gone back to playing after a good number of years and
after finding out her guitar is now worth a small car.  Anyway, I love
the sound of the acoustic guitar, due in part to the folk-music craze
of my youth, in part to the artistry of Julian Bream and the Romeros.

The guitar - at least if the player picks, rather than strums - always
struck me as temperamental an instrument as the french horn, even under
the hands of a decent executant.  The little inadvertent scoops and
slides made by fingers riding the strings too closely on the fretboard
as they move from note to note or the sharp little thud of a note picked
but not sounded or the accidental buzz of a note due to God knows what
are just the usual pitfalls.  It's an instrument that loves to point out
its owner's deficiencies.  Furthermore, many classical players seem to
lose rhythm in harder passages, as well as clarity.  Seldom do you find
a player able to consistently deliver not only notes, but music.

Cobo plays so well, he tends to overshadow the music, and the music is
strong in itself, as well as well-written for the guitar.  Each composer
on the program is a virtuoso guitar player in his own right, so one
experiences the concert as one might a display piece by Liszt -- where
the performer's dazzling technique becomes an integral part of one's
enjoyment.  If there's a technically-better guitarist than Cobo, I don't
know who.  Furthermore, with perhaps the exception of Sainz de la Maza's
Homenaje a Toulouse-Lautrec, a lovely fin-de-siecle waltz, all of these
works pose considerable interpretive challenges.  The opening to Dyens's
Villa-Lobos homage is a toccata featuring AK47-rapid repeated notes.
Dyens designed the opening not only to impress, but to get the listener's
jaw to drop, and Cobo unquestionably achieves the effect.  The second
movement emphasizes colors and "orchestration," as if the guitar were a
small Brazilian combo doing a set in a club. The guitar sets up
calls-and-responses with itself, and Cobo creates the illusion of different
"groups" handling each one.  The third movement is an aria of the type
of the famous one in Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras No.  5.  The
finale is a blazing samba, with all sorts of cross-rhythms and various
textures.  Cobo plays everything preternaturally cleanly and generates
great rhythmic excitement throughout.

Pujol's multi-movement Elegia for Piazzola is, paradoxically, the most
Villa-Lobos-like guitar music on the CD, particularly the "Melancolia"
second movement, a slow tune accompanied by a South-American syncopation.
Pereira's Pieces Bresiliennes evoke the energy of Brazilian jazz.  The
effect is that of hearing hard bop in Rio.  Again, Cobo produces a huge
range of colors on his instrument - nails, no nails, various half stops
on the frets - and he uses them to illuminate the structure of the pieces.

Dyens's neatly-named L. B. Story quotes material from Cuban
guitarist-composer Leo Brouwer and from Leonard Bernstein (the opening
Jets song in West Side Story).  Just describing it sounds like shreds
and patches, but Dyens writes tight.  The piece is also unusual in that
it doesn't resort to a Spanish or South American idiom.  It's a little
Modernist gem.

John Major (not the Tory former prime minister) dedicates Burning Circle
to Keith Jarrett and "R. Colavito." I assume that's Rocky Colavito,
power-hitter wannabe who played for the Cleveland Indians in the Fifties
and Sixties and later (briefly) for the Yankees.  On the other hand, I
have no idea why anyone would want to devote a piece to Rocky, a flashy
but not particularly solid player.  At any rate, Major's score poses the
greatest interpretive challenge on the disc, since it's the most diffuse.
It has the meanders (and occasionally dithers) like a Keith Jarrett solo.
However, it's also the most contrapuntally stunning on the disc.  If you
think about it, most guitar pieces fall into the category of melody line
plus accompaniment, although the accompaniment often implies more than
it actually states.  A composer gets a guitar to do counterpoint only
through extreme brilliance and a profound understanding of the instrument:
Bach and Dowland come to mind.  Major sets up three independent ideas
and gets them going simultaneously.  The guitar writing is ingenious and
difficult as a bear.  Again, Cobo plays as if the challenges didn't
exist.  How he gets through the piece without twisting his fingers up,
I don't know.  One hears music, rather than difficulty.

Larry Cooperman spearheads the New Millenium movement of music written
for guitar.  I'm not quite clear on the movement's aims, but from it has
come an expansion of technique and musical idiom, without denying the
guitar's inner nature.  All the composers on the CD play guitar as well,
and more than passably.  All of them have written works that seem to
call for the Jimi Hendrix of the classical guitar.  One can easily imagine
them getting ideas from their time playing.  Cooperman's Walking on the
Water comes from Kosinski's Being There (I haven't read the book, but I
saw the movie).  The piece strikes me as a modern equivalent of a Dowland
fantasia.  It forces the player through a gantlet of techniques, including
harmonics and faux harmonics, various ingenious strum patterns, and so
on.  Cobo even produces different colors from his instrument simultaneously
- perhaps a trick on the ear.  Its difficulties must be fiendish, because
Cobo makes more noise on the frets than in any other cut - which puts
him down a notch to a merely outstanding virtuoso rather than someone
who, guitaristically speaking, indeed walks on water.  If you can't tell
by now, I consider this one of most the outstanding guitar discs I've
ever heard.  Highly recommended.

Steve Schwartz