This year's Dublin Guitar Week follows last year's format in being spread across two long weekends. The Instituto Cervantes has co-operated with Irish and Spanish companies and with seven other countries to present 12 concerts in six city-centre venues, given by players of at least 10 nationalities - a truly international event.
Some programmes show a welcome move away from the all-too-common sequence of short, unrelated pieces. Also, while it is a fair bet that the Flamenco concert, next Saturday, will prove the highlight it has been before, there are several other programmes oriented around a style, county, period, or innovative performer.
For example, on Thursday, Le Trio de Guitares de Paris will play two complete arrangements of concertos by Vivaldi and one by Bach. On Friday the Portuguese composer-guitarist Joaquim D'Azurem will play his own compositions. On Saturday, Ireland's Richard Sweeney will play the lute in a concert devoted to one of the last great lutenist-composers, S.L. Weiss (1686-1750).
Guitar Week nevertheless remains a pot-pourri. One performance of the complete Villa-Lobos Etudes is welcome; two looks like carelessness. Falla's Homenaje "Le tombeau de Claude Debussy" crops up twice, while staple-fare composers such as Giuliani, Rodrigo and Leo Brouwer each recur in two or three programmes.
The three concerts I attended at the weekend epitomised all this. In the first two, on Friday night and Saturday lunchtime, the musicality of the playing made a stronger impact than the compositions. Jose Luis Ruiz del Puerto's programme of 20th-century music from his native Spain was cohesive, but largely insubstantial, despite the impression left by Rooms, a rapturously post-modern confection of famous quotes and heady ramblings, composed by Emilio Calandin (b. 1958). The collation of original guitar works and transcriptions played by the British guitarists Richard Hand and Tom Dupre was bitty . However, I have rarely heard a guitar duo explore such a range of colour, or such variety of character.
Saturday night's concert was in a different league. Johannes Tonio Kreusch's programme was cohesive, being devoted almost entirely to 20th-century Latin-American compositions for guitar. It was as substantial as one could hope for from this repertoire, for it included all 12 of Villa-Lobos's Etudes and Ginastera's Sonata, written in 1976.
This young German guitarist believes in this music, as deeply as a pianist would believe in the absolute values of Chopin's Etudes and sonatas. The performances had an elevated quality - reinforced by Kreusch's playing from memory, with eyes-closed, headback posture - and an individuality which utterly transcended the occasional technical flaw. I hardly recognised the three or four Etudes one regularly hears. But the unfamiliar pacing and colour - Kreusch knows how to exploit vibrato as many famous violinists do not - seemed to reveal untapped resources in the music and to subvert convention. This was a recital to remember.
For details of Dublin Guitar Week 1999, telephone the Instituto Cervantes on (01) 668 2024.
