Skilful guitarist weaves tapestries for listeners
Performance generates thoughts of birds’ wings, moonlight
Close your eyes as you listen to Mark Jennings play the guitar and your mind weaves tapestries made of his sinuous flow of notes.
His fingers turn the guitar into a loom of melody, the left hand weaving the chords while his right hand threads the weft of melody.
It was like that for two hours at Sue Gordon’s ’Spirit of Spain’ presentation of Jennings’ works at the Richmond House Museum on Sunday March 10. Late afternoon concerts are enchanting things, translating the decline of day into the welcome-home of night.
And what a welcome it was! The strummed tremelo melodic line of Francisco Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra turned into the murmuring of a gigantic flock of birds as they divided and united in the sky in search of nests for the night. Tárrega published only 19 works during his life, and this is the most often performed.
That hummingbird-wing tremelo quaver is achieved by brushing the strings with the fingernails instead of the plucking them. (The left-hand ”neck” fingernails on a guitarist are short but the right-hand “sound box” fingernails are quite long, the better to pluck with.)
The intricate arabesques of the Alhambra’s arches and lintels emerged from Granada by Isaac Albéniz to become the coloured tilework we remember from our visit there many years ago.
Three pieces by J.S Bach became the shimmering night sky of stars plucked from the sky and pasted onto a musical score.
Our galaxy sat before us on the
stage, rebadged as Mark Jennings.
The eruptive chords and crescendos of Heitor Villa-Lobos give little doubt why he was considered Brazil’s most bombastic musical contribution to his era.
The seldom-played Madrõnas by Federico Torroba became a sound-cloud of gnats flitting in the coppery sun of late day.
Joaquín Rodrigo described the famous Adagio second movement in his Concerto de Aranjuez as ’capturing the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the splashing of fountains in the gardens of the palace of Aranjuez’.
Rodrigo, who became blind at the age of three, wrote his compositions in Braille and they were transcribed for publication And that’s the way Mark played it, magnolias and all. Rodrigo and his wife Victoria remained silent for many years about the inspiration for that second movement, which he said, ’came into my head within a few minutes, fully formed.’ Eventually Victoria revealed that the adagio’s mix of joy and tristesse was his response to the happy memory of their honeymoon and sadness of the loss of their first child before it was born.
When jazz musician Miles Davis played the piece he remarked, ’That melody is so supple that the softer you play it, the stronger it gets, and the louder you play it, the weaker it gets.”
It is astonishing to learn that Rodrigo never played the guitar.
There is an aphorism among professional musicians, “You don’t practice a piece till you get it right. You practice it till you can’t get it wrong.”
Little wonder, then, that the precision of Jennings’ playing is so lucid you can hear the silence in between his posh plucks as clearly as you can see the transparency between the lacy web of veins in a dragonfly’s wings.
A solo guitar sheds the artifices of microphones and mixers and speakers to return us to the lyricism of sound that needs no assistance. Songbirds, too, need no help. A nightingale in night would be ghastly if it was fed through an echo reverb.
Beethoven himself once uttered, “The guitar is the sound of moonlight.”
In Jennings’ hands, melody and simplicity are moonlight made in heaven.
How lucky we are that Jennings knows how to bring it to Earth.