Guitarist Łukasz Kuropaczewski: Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival

A new face at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival this season is the Polish guitarist Łukasz Kuropaczewski, who appears in four concerts this week. Now in his mid-thirties, Kuropaczewski studied with Manuel Barrueco at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, which sponsored his debut recital at New York’s Weill Recital Hall in 2007. Since then he has been traveling the guitar circuit when not teaching at the Poznan´ Academy of Music in his native country or directing the annual Polish Guitar Academy in the same city. His solo recital at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 8, comprises work by Giuliani (Rossiniana No. 3), Albéniz (Asturias), and the contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof Meyer, in addition to the 1933 Sonata for Guitar by Antonio José, a short-lived Spanish composer who was executed by the Falangists during the Spanish Civil War, just two months after Lorca met the same fate. On Sunday, Aug. 9, and Monday, Aug. 10 (at 6 p.m. each evening), he assists the Orion String Quartet in the premiere of Marc Neikrug’s Acequias for Guitar and String Quartet, on a program that also include music by Debussy (his Première Rhapsodie, with clarinetist Todd Levy and pianist Haochen Zhang) and Dvorˇ ák (his Quartet in G major, Op. 106, played by the Orions). On Tuesday, Aug. 11, at noon, he repeats his Giuliani and Albéniz pieces and adds two other works, an anonymous 19thcentury Romance d’amour and Alexandre Tansman’s Prélude et Interlude; on this last program, the Miami String Quartet also offers Mendelssohn’s E-minor Quartet (Op. 44, No. 2). All of these concerts take place in St. Francis Auditorium (New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.). For tickets and information call 505-982-1890 or visit www.santafechambermusic.com.