Italian guitarist display his mastery

M. Taufiqurrahman and Jim Read, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Stage fright is a specter that can haunt even an internationally acclaimed artist who has traveled extensively in his concert career.

A solo guitar recital before a keen, musically literate audience in an intimate, salon-like venue will simply amplify the harsh spotlight that is inevitably thrown mercilessly on the soloist.

But it can also serve to highlight the artist's subsequent triumph -- if he can overcome it, regain his confidence and shine more brightly for the remainder of the performance.

Such a mini-drama transpired during a guitar recital by Italian artist Stefano Cardi, organized by the Italian Institute of Culture in collaboration with Gedung Kesenian Jakarta (GKJ) on Tuesday night.

Turning in a performance that drew the largest audience to date to GKJ's Jakarta Anniversary Festival, Cardi, a guitar professor at Girolano Frescobaldi Conservatory, Ferrara, northern Italy, started as if under tremendous pressure to deliver a flawless recital.

Although technical skill was really not at issue during Cardi's performance, the audience could have been forgiven for feeling that from the staple guitar fare by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos to halfway through the last composition by William Walton, the items flew by without ever making a real mark on the collective consciousness.

Cardi's face bore a tense expression during the first half, while he was glued firmly to his seat, searching for the finest tones he could possibly muster.

During a rendition of Two Venezuelan Christmas Songs (anon) for instance, Cardi's plucked his guitar to lyrical effect -- enough to foretell some kind of impending doom.

However, the peril did not arrive until the end of the first half. It was as if the thunder in the distance never quite materialized.

While the music that filled the first half was a kind of tentative tapas, the post-interval offerings were altogether more hearty fare -- more osso buco -- if you pardon the culinary switch from southern Spain to northern Italy.

The much-anticipated thunder arrived when Cardi gave a confident rendition of Astor Piazzolla's Milonga del Angel.

Preceded by an energetic introduction that evoked the stomping of an army on the march, Cardi produced some exuberant strumming that, midway through the composition, delivered a much-needed boost to the recital.

Milonga also marked the culmination of the 46-year-old guitarist's effort to regain control of the show, something that he did right after the start of the second half.

The audience, too, discovered the gems they had come to hear.

Not a single note was wasted; in the 30-minute-plus set the audience was bathed in a kaleidoscope of carefully crafted sound.

Cardi gave an encore titled Oblivion (by Piazzolla) after receiving a bouquet from the GKJ management and some enthusiastic applause from the audience.

In a backstage interview, Cardi said that he had been somewhat distracted by camera shutters that had clicked more frequently during the first part of the recital.

"In the second half, I felt more relaxed because there were fewer photographers taking pictures," he told The Jakarta Post.

Cardi also said that electronic amplification had played a great role in reducing the difficulties guitarists encounter when attempting to project within a concert hall the intimate tones that the instrument naturally produces.

"Amplification is a compromise: The guitar may sound a little less 'natural', but with it I don't have to play my instrument so 'hard' and can be more relaxed. It's just like playing in a room of five people," he said.

By the end of Tuesday's recital the audience, replete with "fragments of the 20th century" (as the recital was billed), would have agreed.