Sheer joy
Harb performs with mastery and bonhomie
By Paul Bonner
A guitarist who plays a much-loved work has a tougher job than one who premieres a piece; the artist must bring something to the performance that is fresh but not so idiosyncratic as to distract from the work’s familiarity. That’s Lesson 1.
Tariq Harb succeeded admirably on that score in TGS’s Feb. 12 concert online via Konnectclub, executing a blockbuster program with sureness and, what is rarer, sheer joy.
His program had at its heart a trio of quintessentially Spanish pieces. And what a heart it was! Harb played them with a panache that quickened the listener’s pulse. One gets the sense of a player who, despite not being himself Spanish (he is Canadian but grew up in Gaza and Jordan), has nonetheless seen deeply into the Iberian soul. As TGS Vice President Dennis Aberle said in introducing Harb, he is a new, and hopefully longtime, friend.
His guitar’s tone came across as full-voiced and clear, and with as precise intonation as this reviewer has ever heard in a fretted instrument. Harb said it was built in 2020 by British Columbian luthier Martin Blackwell, a double-top cedar/cedar with balsa core.
Harb opened with a workhorse of the repertoire, J.S. Bach’s Prelude, BWV 999, originally in C minor but generally transposed, as Harb did, to D minor. The sole source is a manuscript copy by Johann Peter Keller, an organist and friend of Bach’s, with “pour la lute” on the title page.
Harb’s playing was wonderfully pellucid and secure. There were no surprises, although it always seems miraculous that any mortal can play that F major-seventh chord with the little-finger half-barre on the fifth fret and low F on the first. (He nailed it, seemingly effortlessly.) As he pointed out afterward, the piece is full of threes: three flats in the (original) key, ¾ rhythm, three bass notes per measure.
Another staple followed, the Prelude No. 1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. This is from the composer’s Five Preludes published in 1940 and dedicated to his beloved “Mindinha” (Arminda Neves d’Almeida). No. 1 is subtitled Melodia Lirica, or Lyrical Melody, and marked andantino espressivo. Sometimes, one hears its tempestuous E minor opening played without the emphatic conviction it requires — in another era, it might have been called sturm und drang — which sets off the, yes, lyrical — or better, stately — second part in E major.
But Harb summoned the proper degree of intensity, expertly bringing out the dramatic voice leading in the bass. A listener commented afterward in the chat box on Harb’s inserted mordent at one point, which Harb said was improvised. Again, small, judicious innovations can go a long way, as in Lesson 1, above.
Then followed the Spanish pieces, which Harb dedicated to guitarmaker José Luis Romanillos, who had died earlier that day at age of 90 and so was a link to the earlier world of Spanish guitar music, besides being a great luthier.
The Catalan pianist and composer Joaquím Malats’s works are of a piece with the Spanish nationalism of his contemporaries Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados and are similarly guitaristic although not originally for guitar. His Serenata Española, which Harb played with verve, was part of Malats’s Impresiones de España. It has been arranged by Francisco Tárrega, Andrés Segovia, and Julian Bream. In a triple meter and Phrygian mode, it is clearly flamenco-influenced. Harb applied some rubato to the cantabile melody in its central section, which kept it supple and affecting.
Joaquín Rodrigo, arguably the best nonguitarist to ever write for the guitar, composed En los Trigales (In the Wheat Fields) in 1938, a year before his monumental Concierto de Aranjuez. One gets the same feeling from it as with Aranjuez of seeing a sunny Spanish rural landscape, with peasants and donkey carts stopping in at a dusty roadside bodega, all encoded into the notes as vividly and explicitly as if by braille (Rodrigo was, after all, blind). It is bookended by a sprightly country dance, its brief middle section an expository song in the bass, which Harb played with ample vibrato and scintillating harmonics.
Next up was the great Malagueña, Op. 165, by Albeniz. It is No. 3 of his España and another triple-meter piece. In its A-B-A form and spirit, it is much like his better-known Leyenda, or Asturias. Harb realized with an almost flamenco sensibility its intended evocation of Andalusia.
Harb called the version by Edson Lopes he played of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, a “fantastic arrangement,” which this reviewer would heartily second. As Harb said, the common perception of the piece is as the growliest of organ pieces, suitable as a soundtrack for horror movies. But its contrapuntal achievement is best appreciated in a fresh context, and the guitar does clarify it, as he said.
No less remarkable was Harb’s own autobiographically programmatic composition that followed in five short movements, titled Spirit. The first movement, Dance of the Jinn, employed what Harb called an “awkward and weird motif” that he playfully said might have been suggested to him by the mischievous and elusive creatures of Middle Eastern mythology themselves.
His guitar then became the ticking and gonging grandfather clock in his grandfather’s home in Gaza in Midnight, an accompaniment to childhood insomnia and all the other small noises that fill the wee hours. Time dilated into musical reveries, snatches of indistinct conversation, and — was that a muezzin’s distant call to prayer?
The third movement, Rondo, was a kind of modern courante, reminiscent of some of Andrew York’s pieces. In the fourth movement, Meditativo, Harb used tremolo to create a spacious and serene effect, according to program notes on his website. It quoted Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.
The final Motherland, Harb said, is a tribute to his late mother, Dr. Asma Harb and reflects her admiration for classical Arabic music, including by its use of a rhythmic ostinato known as fallahi.
Taken as a whole, Spirit is charming to the nth degree — touching, even, in how it combines whimsical imagination, respect for the artist’s heritage, and attentiveness to structural coherence.
Harb saved the best for last, in this reviewer’s opinion. Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune is one of those piano pieces that one thinks should work well on the guitar, with its quiet introspection that builds to exultation. But most arrangements don’t generate the note sustain where needed. Or they try to preserve it but at the cost of playability. This reviewer had never heard of the arranger, James Bishop-Edwards, but folks, if you want to play this piece, don’t bother with anyone else’s version. Of course, Harb’s magisterial playing is what really made the difference.
In a bit of online banter after the concert was officially done, someone must have dared Harb to play the Concierto de Aranjuez, because he laughed and spontaneously broke into a bit of the first movement. “I just need an orchestra, and my cat doesn’t play violin,” he quipped, then played the ending of the cadenza from the Adagio.
As a final encore, Harb played Niccolo Paganini’s Romanze, the middle movement of his Grand Sonata in A major — fortunately, not the pastiche of it arranged by Manuel Ponce, who, it seemed, never learned Lesson 1.
To sum up, TGS Secretary Scott Merkle may have put it best, in an after-concert email: “TGS should have him again as soon as pandemically possible. His program was excellent, and his artistry was great. He had an engaging ‘on screen’ presence.”