Guitar Concerts

I was lucky enough to find out about two guitar concerts right away. One was because people were handing out pamphlets.
Manuel González & Barcelona Dúo Guitarra
Basílica del Pi
20:30h
15 euros

This concert was excellent. The duo came out first and opened with the Carmen Suite by G. Bizet (1838-1875) with the following movements
Danza Argonesa
Habanera
Toreador
Seguidilla
Danza Gitana
The first three has themes that I recognized. Hearing this piece made me want to pick up a guitar and start playing alongside them. The group then played Pablo Sarasate Aires Gitanos and Zapateado.

The duet played with different techniques that as of now I can only describe because I don't know their names. Instead of pressing down the fret they press lightly to activate the other harmonics. Also, the accompanying guitar hit the lower strings with his thumb instead of strumming to give a percussive sound at some point. They also varied the position of their right hand plucking the strings.

Next came Manuel González. The sound reinforcement was changed from a mic that looked like an R44 to a Shure condenser microphone. The sound personnel messed up because they hadn't turned the speakers back on before he began to play. Fortunately for me it gave me a chance to compare the acoustics inside the church with and without sound reinforcement. With definitely sounded better because his notes filled the entire church without drowning out the melody with the reverberation. González played pieces by Albéniz and Tárrega which were fantastic. At one point he used a style where he bended together the three steel strings and strummed them while playing the melody on the higher pitched nylon strings. To me this sounded like a snare drum accompaniment.

Earlier that day I had passed by the Palau de Musica Catalonya to take the architectural tour (8euros) and I saw the billboard with upcoming concerts and it just so happened that there was going to be a classical guitar concert the next day. Therefore on Monday I showed up at the ticketoffice when it opened and bought my ticket. I got a seat front and center in the second row.

The concert was for the 20th anniversary of the death of Frederic Mompou. The program is in Catalá so it is hard for me to correctly translate the details of the pieces and performer, Jaume Torrent. What I can say is that he played very old classical pieces (16-17th century) so that his techniques of playing the guitar were not as varied as those of the previous concert. They were, however, very technically challenging for the left hand to the point where there were a few notes and chords that did not come out clearly and made me shrug. The pieces on the concert program took only 20 minutes so everyone was just hanging around waiting for an encore. 15 minutes later Torrent came back out to give a series of encores that lasted almost 45 minutes.