Amsterdam Guitar Trio

STRING trios, piano trios, clarinet trios, horn trios, as most often met in the concert hall, all have one thing in common. They are all actually mixed instrument ensembles, unlike guitar trios, three of a kind groups, with a repertoire apparently as impoverished as that for, say, three violins, three cellos or three pianos.

It was obviously, then, a good idea for the Music Network, when organising a tour by the Amsterdam Guitar Trio, to commission a new work for the occasion, Rhona Clarke's Inside Out. This short piece is cast in two movements. The first never really warms up, marking time in an idly riffy way. The second has an altogether richer, bluesier feel, the sort of thing one could imagine accompanying a lonely movement in a Jim Jarmusch film. I'm not sure, however, that the hand slapping of the wood of the guitar is a feature that would wear well on repeated hearings.

The rest of the programme was made up of arrangements, of Scarlatti (three sonatas), Shostakovich (the Concertino for two pianos), Boccherini (movements from a quintet for guitar and strings), Chopin (the Fourth Ballade) and the Argentinian tango king, Astor Piazzolla (of a piece whose name I didn't catch there were no printed programmes supplied).

The most successful of these was the Piazzolla (with entirely apt use of the percussive techniques essayed in Inside Out) and the Boccherini, benefitting, it seemed, from the inclusion of guitar in the original material.

Elsewhere, the arrangements were an odd mixture of comfort (in terms of what suited the guitar) and awkwardness(in terms of what suited - or rather didn't suit - the music).

Techniques of musical transcript ion and arrangement have long been brought to an extremely high level but the bulk of what was heard at this concert had about as much panache and musical point as simplified, drawing room versions of popular 19th century opera arias. In terms of serious musical engagement, the arrangements were not a patch on those of Kazuhito Yamashita, who undertakes amazing, warts and all, single guitar accounts of works like Dvorak's Nest: World Symphony, Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.