The high wire act

Pavel Steidl played with devilish perfection at the Walton's Guitar Festival, writes Michael Dervan

There are always performers who have their listeners leaning forward in their seats to see how it's being done, how those unimaginable effects and seemingly impossible sounds are being produced. Enrico Pace did it playing Liszt in the semi-finals of the Dublin International Piano Competition, and I've also got very clear memories of violinist Ruggiero Ricci and pianist Evgeny Kissin having the same effect.

Czech guitarist Pavel Steidl, who gave a lunchtime recital at the National Gallery during last week's Walton's Guitar Festival of Ireland, is another player to create the same buzz of wizardry.

Steidl was playing minor-league repertoire (Mertz, Paganini, Legnani, Giuliani) on a period guitar. But he played with such perfection of style, such devilish perfection of technique, such impeccable musical judgment, that you felt there was no other way in which this music could be presented to such good advantage.

It was good that he played so well, for the music itself was pretty trite, mixing elements of the deliberate musical simplicity of Clementi's piano sonatinas and the drawing-room showmanship of Sydney Smith (whose Le jet d'eau was the signature on the Radio Éireann serial, The Foley Family), with a raw virtuosity that's well beyond the reach of drawing-room players.

Part of Steidl's achievement was that he never overstated the music's case. Even the part of his presentation that would fall under the description of clowning - he rather teased his listeners with facial expressions and physical gestures - somehow stayed within the musical frame of reference, like a winning shot at Wimbledon, which seems destined to go out, but excitingly clips the line. Steidl's was a high-wire act, venturing to the edge but never straying over it, and he seemed to capture the essence of an area of music that in most hands often sounds fussy and cheap.

At the other end of the scale, the Waltons Festival offered a popular pairing of John Williams and John Etheridge at the National Concert Hall. The two men played as though on auto-pilot, easy-going and casual, though not immune from glitches with the microphones and moments of electronic feedback. It may well have been an evening of middle-of-the-road heaven, and there were certainly moments of rare finger-picking agility. But, musically, it was bland beyond belief.

Far more absorbing was the programme offered at St Ann's Church by Manuel Barrueco, a player who commands the control of line and colour to make Bach on the guitar (a transcription of the Solo Violin Sonata in G minor) a rewarding undertaking. Barrueco is one of those rare creatures, a guitarist who makes matters of technique sound at all times secondary to issues of musical communication.

By contrast, the much-praised (and much younger) Chinese virtuoso, Xuefei Yang, didn't show either the musical or technical mastery to deal with a transcription of Bach's great Chaconne in D minor, and her handling of 19th-century music tended toward the lilt of doggerel. Her considerable colouristic strengths were revealed in Barrios's Sueño en la floresta and she was also heard to good advantage in a handful of Villa-Lobos studies.

John Feeley is closer to Barrueco in temperament, and his major offering was also of Bach, a transcription of the Cello Suite in G, delivered with musicianly care. Also like Barrueco, he offered a programme dominated by transcriptions, a tacit acknowledgement of the difficulty of creating viable programmes purely from works originally written for guitar.

Michael O'Toole steered clear of arrangements (like Feeley he dropped an advertised selection of pieces by John Dowland) and he was the only player to include a work by an Irish composer, Jerome de Bromhead's Gemini.

The Greek guitarist Elena Papandreou offered Takemitsu, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Dyens, and showed herself to be stronger on the creation of atmosphere than the generation of momentum. It was in the phantasmagorical blendings of Roland Dyens's Triaela, a work dedicated to her, that her style was most effective.

Lorenzo Micheli's programme overlapped with Papandreou's, and it was the Italian who scored more highly in Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Sonata, Op 77, a substantial "homage to Boccherini". Micheli, who provided useful spoken introductions, essays a style of considerable flamboyance, and he does a strong line in special effects - the left-hand-only variation in a fantasy by Sor, for instance, and streams of effective harmonics.

Unlike Steidl, however, he seemed to be a player for whom the display became the point, leading him into expressive exaggerations which didn't quite come off. Steidl's expert marriage of musicality and display set standards that are hard to rival.