Concert Review: Rodrigo y Gabriela

On a pure spur-of-the-moment decision, I decided to make my way up to the Greek Theatre at Berkeley on my birthday for Rodrigo y Gabriela's first concert ever in the Bay Area. And I am so glad I decided to go. It has been two days since the concert and I'm still on a bit of a high from the performance. The energy given off by this duo is incredible! Their journey to fame is one worth retelling. They first met in Mexico when they played in the same thrash metal band called Tierra Ácida. Frustrated at the limited scope of the music scene in Mexico, they completely uprooted themselves and moved to Dublin, Ireland, a city with a reputation for being extremely welcoming to aspiring musicians. There, they discovered and refined their sound by playing various live gigs at pubs and busking on Grafton Street and Temple Bar, one of the principal shopping streets and liveliest nightlife areas, respectively, in Dublin. They received their big break when they were approached by popular Irish singer/musician Damien Rice, who provided support for them at Oxegen, Ireland's equivalent of Woodstock or Lollapalooza. Since then, their career took off and they now tour extensively around the world.

The weather on Saturday was unusually nice by Bay Area standards, prompting Gabriela to facetiously note that San Francisco weather feels "tropical". Darkness wasn't even settling in when the opening set of Xavier Rudd and Izintaba took to the stage at 8PM. The band used a wide assortment of instruments (prominently featuring Rudd on didjeridu) and played six songs in 50 minutes. You can guess what my overall impression of the band is if you notice what the average length of each song comes out to be. While the songs all started out well, they soon overstayed their welcome. The lyrics were repetitive and one song (a ~15 minute epic) made me ask myself "I wonder how much longer this song is". However, I enjoyed the presence of his two bandmates (on drums/bongo and bass guitar) who grooved and provided an upbeat and humble air to their playing. Other members of the audience seemed to have enjoyed their performance more than I did, sending them off with enthusiastic applause at the conclusion of their set.

After a stage change that took a lengthy 20 minute, RodGab took to the stage. In the crowd's roar, they began the night with their popular single Hanuman (first video below). Immediately, the audience began to sway and dance to the music and I found myself unconsciously swaying along as well. Their music was infectious and invited you to dance. They smoldered with passion onstage, with Rodrigo oftentimes looking deeply towards Gabriela while she closed her eyes to be more attuned to the music. That's not to say they were playing within themselves the whole night; quite the contrary, by running in place, jumping up and down, or simply moving to face another part of the crowd, they were able to excite the listeners and put them on a high. They also had the audience participate en masse, asking different sections of the crowd to clap out simple rhythms, which provided the rhythmic accompaniment to one of their songs. In the few times they spoke to the audience, it became obvious that Gabriela was the more articulate of the two but Rodrigo's loss for words was incredibly endearing for the audience.

As awesome as they are, I was worried going in that the duo's playing would begin to sound too similar and tedious after a period of time. After all, empirically, the only things onstage for the whole concert were the two performers and their guitars. However, this fear were quickly allayed, for they are more than capable of creating a kaleidoscope of colors from one guitar. Rodrigo's capricious fingerwork is sweet in sound and he occasionally uses the wah-wah pedal to great effect. Gabriela is a beast on rhythm. By tapping and hitting different parts of the guitar, she creates different percussive sounds for her rhythmic beats. Their set list was incredibly diverse, ranging from flamenco to heavy metal to world music. The two guest artists of the night helped diversify their sound. L. Shankar, probably best known for providing the opening vocals to the TV show Heroes, hypnotized the crowd with his soothing voice. Jazz guitar legend Al di Meola performed a solo before participating in a jam session with RodGab. In both instances, there were technical (i.e. hardware) malfunctions: Shankar's double electric five-string violin was barely audible and one of the Meola's guitar strings weren't being picked up on the amp. Nonetheless, the audience obviously loved the fact they were were there in concert and wildly cheered when the two guest artists left the stage.

For me, the two high points of the concert was when the duo didn't play together. Each performed their own solos that highlighted their fortes. Rodrigo began his solo with a highly intimate and lyrical melody, which elicited many "I love you Rodrigo!" from the audience. The music became more and more excited until his heavy metal influences (and the wah-wah pedal) came back. Even though his solo was pretty damn amazing, Gabriela's solo absolutely blew everyone away. Her right hand technique, perfectly knowing when to strum the chord amidst the flurry of percussive motions, mesmerized everyone. The crowd was in an absolute frenzy when she finished.

They ended the concert right at 11PM with Tamacun (last video below). Due to the theatre curfew, the duo were not able to oblige the appreciative crowd's calls for encores. I really hoped to hear their rendition of Stairway to Heaven (second video below), but alas, that was not on their set list for the night. Regardless, the concert is still one of the best I've ever been to. My friend who went with me to the concert made an interesting comment when she said she loves these two because they are real guitarists. After thinking about this statement for a moment, I wholeheartedly agree. Most mainstream "guitarists" I see nowadays (Taylor Swift immediately comes to mind) are simply using the same strum patterns on the same chord progression over and over again. These pop artists ask what the guitar can do for them, whereas genuine guitarists ask what can they do to further the art of guitar playing. I believe the reason why they have achieved such an enthusiastic following is because their playing is genuine and they do not treat guitar-playing as a means to an end. Rodrigo y Gabriela are consummate musicians and artisans in their own right and I eagerly look forward to the next time they visit the Bay Area.

Concert Review: Music@Menlo Aftermath: 1945

Shostakovich String Quartet No.8 in C Minor, Op.110

    Miró Quartet

Britten The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Op.35

    Matthew Plenk, tenor

    Ken Noda, piano

Strauss Metamorphosen

    Jorja Fleezanis, Lily Francis, violins

    Beth Guterman, Erin Keefe, violas

    David Finckel, Ralph Kirshbaum, cellos

    Scott Pingel, bass

On Tuesday's San Francisco Classical Voice newsletter, there was a contest. You can win two tickets to a Music@Menlo concert if you were one of the first two people to answer the trivia question correctly. Who knew all the random classical music trivia floating in my head would end up helping me score free concert tickets. Having been away from the music scene for a couple of months, this concert was a nice respite from all the job hunting I've been doing.

I have always been a huge fan of Miró Quartet; I have been trying to see them in concert ever since I saw them play in a masterclass with Isaac Stern. Them playing one of my favorite quartets (a piece I featured in a previous post, coincidentally) was just the icing on the cake. After a quick program change announcement by festival co-director Wu Han, the quartet took the stage. When they started to play, I was floored by their homogeneity in tone. It was absolutely stunning and made the starkness of the opening chorale that much more affecting. Furthermore, I was mesmerized by how attuned they were to one another's colors, contrary to the "American" style of quartet playing. Their reading of the first movement was more withdrawn than I'm used to hearing, which was not a bad thing. Even in the radiantly central episode, where first violin David Chang played the beautifully lyrical melody, the mood was more of sadness from remembrances of happier times rather than happiness of past remembrances. The second movement was full of grit, with violist John Largess standing out in an extended viola solo that climbed to stratospheric heights on the C string. The third movement was the highlight of the piece, where everyone had their moment to shine. The interrupting "scream" by second violinist Sandy Yamamoto, with her powerful tone, was jarring and shocking. Largess' decision to employ an extremely dry staccato (almost all stick and no hair) created a percussive effect that made the danse macabre all the more chilling. Cellist Joshua Gindele's effortless playing in the tenor range was otherworldly and his long pedal notes were perfectly controlled, making himself heard without distracting from the other voices. The hall was dead silent when the piece ended, and with a collective exhale, the audience sent the quartet off with a rousing applause.

I went in not knowing the Britten songs at all. The program notes informed the audience that Britten went on tour with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin shortly after the war ended. For the first concert, they performed in front of survivors from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The experience moved him very deeply and resulted in him composing the song cycle set to poems of John Donne, where all the poems centered centered around the theme of death, repentance, and reconciliation in faith with God. Tenor Matthew Plenk, renown in the opera world, was powerful and impressive in his singing. Even in the quietest moments of the cycle, his tone was pure and reverberant. In the louder passages, his sound pierced through the air and had a visceral effect on the listener's body. The song cycle was widely ranging, in terms of vocal range, dynamics, style, and tempi. It is the Britten we love (or hate), with angular, dissonant music juxtaposed with lyrically beautiful moments of respite. Watching how Plenk handles each song with ease is a sight to see in itself and I was extremely moved by his singing of the third song ("O might those sighes and teares") in particular. However, pianist Ken Noda was somewhat a liability in his accompaniment. The faster passages came out uneven and muffled, which he seemed to try to cover up with idiosyncratic theatrics. There were moments where I felt his playing was on a completely different plane relative to Plenk's, which is a pity because Plenk was doing some tremendous things with the music. However, the complaint is minor and I still thoroughly enjoyed the performance.

The only performance that didn't quite take off was the Strauss, which is unfortunate because I really wanted to like it. Perhaps this is because I recently performed the piece with UC Berkeley Symphony, but there were things that just didn't move me the way that I hope it would. The piece is a requiem for the physical and cultural ruin of Germany after the second World War. In Metamorphosen, Strauss takes two themes, one being heavily influenced by Beethoven's Eroica symphony, and slowly subjects them various changes. Structurally, the piece can be divided into three parts (or phases of the metamorphosis) and is played as one continuous movement. The divided parts can be viewed as a central animato section being bookended by two elegiac adagio sections. Moreover, within each section, there are fluxes in terms of emotional intensity and tempo. The two aspects of the performance that made it not as successful as it could have been were the pacing and ensemble of the piece.

With all the episodes within sections going on, it is easy to see how difficult it can be to pace the music as a collective group amongst seven people. The tempo in the beginning was much too slow. Just like talking in an overly slow manner eventually loses the listener's attention, the melodic line was stretched to the point of incoherence. Furthermore, the piece is composed such that the music should gain momentum up until the last adagio section. However, the group had a knack of stopping before transitioning into each new section, completely breaking the momentum and flow of the music. Even when the music instructs doppio tempo, the music becomes only slightly faster rather than doubly fast. By starting out slow and breaking the continuity of the piece, the performance never picked up speed and lost the sense of urgency that is integral to the piece.

My second disappointment was with ensemble playing itself. In the few times the whole group played as one, such as at the end of the doppio tempo, the sound was amazing. These sections unified the group, resulting in big chords that resonated with power and beauty. However, once the voices/parts become more soloistic and individualized, the overall feel of the piece becomes similarly fragmented. There are times when it felt as if everyone was playing their hearts out, but playing on different emotional levels because their part is different from the others. Consequently, some of the cooler inner-voice moments were washed out by the wave of sound. However, I must give props to Lily Francis, the second violinist in the group. Since I played this before, my ear was gravitating towards certain melodic passages, and in the few times that Francis had the solo line, she played with pathos and abandon.

After all is said and done, the concert was still extremely enjoyable. After last night's performance, I look forward to catching the Miró Quartet next time they're in town. Also looking forward to trying to win more tickets from SFCV, because who doesn't love free admission to great concerts?