★★★★☆ Fantastic four wander the globe from Latin America to home.

City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney
October 17, 2016

City Recital Hall’s A Little Lunch Music series, curated by Kathryn Selby, has been building a popular following over recent years with an array of diverse musical talent from William Barton to the Sydney Youth Orchestra and beyond. This time it was the turn of Guitar Trek, at 30-years on the scene and counting Australia’s premier guitar quartet. The outfit has a healthy discography behind them, and the line-up features some of the finest guitarists in the country in Timothy Kain, Minh Le Hoang, Bradley Kunda and Matt Withers. With tickets at $15 dollars a pop, not unsurprisingly the venue was fairly packed to the rafters.

The programme was diverse and engrossing, ranging from Latin Americana, an important Australian work and a comedic take of the dreaded Pachelbel’s Canon. Technically impressive, and with engaging linking banter from Kain, the audience was treated to works that included the easy-on-the-ear but also the somewhat more demanding. Alfonso Montes’ Llanura, their opening salvo, neatly combined both with its attractive fast waltz, its sunny Latin vibe and the shifting sands of its intricately interwoven melodies. The work also opens their latest CD (Serene Nights), an excellent introduction to this first-rate ensemble.

Ariel Ramírez is perhaps best known today for his catchy Missa Criolla, but like many Argentinean composers he wrote songs and was able to embrace both popular and classical idioms. His Alfonsina y el mar was made famous by the great Mercedes Sosa and reflects on the death of the poet Alfonsina Storni, evoking her tragic suicide in 1938 when she threw herself into the sea at La Perla beach in Mar del Plata following a cancer diagnosis. The haunting arrangement saw the wistful, lilting themes passed deftly around the quartet. The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers offered perfect relief and, compelled to emulate an entire symphony orchestra, a chance for the players to show off their considerable manual dexterity.

It was John Williams who recommended Bau’s African-derived Noite Serena to the group – or “naughty Serena” as Kain quipped they call it. An attractive, jazz-infused piece it proved a real crowd pleaser and the perfect foil to the silliness of Loose Canon, an increasingly left-field series of variations on Pachelbel’s ubiquitous theme. Worked up by the LAGQ while killing time in a Tokyo hotel room it features forays into calypso, Latin, Hill Billy, R and B and some distinctly late night jazz. Like many such musical spoofs it is deceptively difficult, but definitely landed on this occasion with the Sydney audience.

The concluding work brought matters back to home with Nigel Westlake’s brilliantly conceived Six Fish. Calling for two standard guitars, a 12-string and a dobro (an acoustic guitar with steel resonating discs inside the body developed by blues players in the 1920s), it is a masterful work and one that creates an original and diverse sound world. Written specially for the ensemble, they proved adept at depicting its sextet of aquatic representations from the colourful, darting Guitarfish – yes, it really exists – to the exuberant, cheeky Flying Fish. The most remarkable movements are the grooving Spangled Emperor, the Leafy Sea Dragon – an impressionistic aquarelle – and the Sling-jaw Wrasse, which exploits the metallic qualities of Withers’ exquisitely played dobra. Check it out – it’s on their Six Fish album…