Austin Classical Guitar (ACG), outdid themselves yet again with a little help from private sponsors at Austin’s favorite black box sound stage for classical guitar performances, The Rosette. Forget Super Bowl Sunday – the audience did indeed drop the ball on that as they sat in stunned silence listening to the brilliant young Polish guitarist Łukasz Kuropaczewski, as part of the Live at the Rosette Series where world-famous musicians join the stage.
He performed for one and a half hours, lacing the short tuning interludes with comic relief. “I wish we had a tuner once, like a piano, so I wouldn’t have to do this between each number.”
Kuropaczewski’s intensity reveals a crispness, a technique of precision and delicate balance like the perfect puff pastry. He doesn’t flash; you notice restraint and that shattering whisper when the fork goes in. Or in his case, when he dives in for a chord repetition. His playing is a geometry of folds, timing, and placement. Of course temperature control is key – if the butter is too warm and the dough not cold enough, everything collapses. The way he scales chords is riveting, and the temperature of the B flat was delicious.
The first impression I had while listening to II. Galiarde from the Suite in modo polonico by Alexandre Tansman was of a lone horseback rider up in the hills of Barcelona sweating in the dry heat as a golden falcon circled above with a message he squinted to read but lost the moment. Then suddenly, as if memory rebounded, he got it, snapped into shape and rode away. The hard ending exemplified this imaginary movement.
Another image came to me while he performed III. Kujawiak in the same suite as a grandmother wearing an apron carrying heavy cast iron dishes of food to a table of relatives waiting outside in the garden. White sheets of freshly finished laundry hanging and blowing in the breeze while the sun dried them to that crisp texture. Fresh cedar scented the air and everyone was laughing.
I could hear remnants of The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” during IV. Polonaise, gentle and only a few chords but enough to carry a memory across decades of sound.
What struck me emotionally were the Préludes, Book from Claude Debussy and the Mazurkas from Chopin (nos. 3,1 & 2, Op. 7 and Nos. 2 & 3, Op. 6). He described Debussy as a great colorful, meaning impressionistic influence on him. The colors he painted with his strings brought several scenes to life in my mind’s eye. There was nothing more beautiful than guitars, said Chopin according to Kuropaczewski.
And there was nothing more beautiful than Kuropaczewski playing for the audience on Feb 7 and 8 at the Rosette.
For ticket information on future shows visit austinclassicalguitar.org