Italian guitarist display his mastery

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.