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Flute-guitar duo short on inspired materialBy JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, ST. PETERSBURG -- Pity the flute-guitar duo. Great instruments on their own, and in combination with others, but together, they appear to be short of inspired material. Exhibit A: the transcription of Bach's Sonata in E minor heard Sunday in the concert by flutist Gary Schocker and guitarist Jason Vieaux at the Museum of Fine Arts. With more flute than guitar in the mix, it was too feathery and one-dimensional for Bach, the perfect excuse to take a catnap on a lazy afternoon, lulled by the rumble of air conditioning. It's not as if the instruments can't blend well. In the hands of a few masters -- Jacques Ibert, a contemporary Brazilian guitarist named Celso Machado -- flute and guitar music is terrific, in large part because these composers didn't skimp on the guitar. Many flute-guitar works are glorified flute vehicles, with the guitar merely taking the place of a keyboard accompaniment, as in the Bach transcription. Ditto even for Bartok's Roumanian Folk Dances, usually played by violin and piano. Of the six gypsy dances Schocker and Vieaux performed, only half caught fire: Joc cu Bata, with its brilliant flute part; the oddly solemn dance Buciumeana; and the brief, lively Poarga romaneasca. In a backhanded kind of way, the giveaway about the humdrum repertoire in the first half of Sunday's concert was how good each musician sounded on his own, Vieaux in a movement from a romantic guitar sonata by Manuel Ponce, Schocker in Luciano Berio's virtuosic Sequenza for flute. They were more interesting as soloists than together. Things got better after intermission when Brazil was represented, not just by Machado's infectious smooth jazz pieces but also by that country's most famous composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, with his hypnotic Distbribucao de Flores. Another highlight was Ibert's Entr'acte, probably the most varied music on the program. Schocker has done his bit for the flute-guitar cause with his own Dream Travels. It's a musical travelogue in five movements, each representing a place: Rio with a bossa nova beat; an Elizabethan tune for Stratford; flamenco guitar for Seville; the dreamy Home Again. Only the delicate music of a movement on Salem, suggesting the 17th century witchcraft trials, came as a real surprise. Schocker and Vieaux wound up with an encore, an arrangement of Tico-Tico that is clever and fun, but it was the same encore they played at the museum a year ago. Foiled again by a shortage of good material.
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