Suvan played his third solo recital at Oberlin on Thursday—his was literally the first solo guitar recital ever in our large performance space, Warner Concert Hall. Normally the home of orchestra, large ensemble and piano recitals, this room seats 500: it is a poor room for a solo guitar (we have many excellent spaces for guitar but none were available on the night he needed to play). For those with long memories, yes, when the GFA Convention was in Oberlin (2005), we used Warner for all our evening concerts, but that was a special circumstance! So to manage the audience experience, Suvan wisely chose to amplify, using our studio-owned Fishman amp to boost his sound. It was gloriously loud, comfortably filling the room with sound and rendering the sonic experience excellent for all present.

Suvan Agarwal on the Warner Concert Hall stage.

Suvan played an unusual program of Baroque music plus the seldom-heard Sonata Romantica of Ponce. This extraordinary piece, an homage to Schubert, seldom reveals it’s mid-20th century Mexican heritage, instead sticking close to its mission of masquerading as a “lost sonata” by the 19th c. master himself. As such, Suvan’s deep understanding of Schubert’s music and of 19th c. style in general enabled him to interpret the piece with the kind of casual mastery seldom heard from young players. (Full program at the end of the post).

The Baroque selections were also unusual: Suvan’s own rendering of the “other” version of a familiar Bach violin work—the Andante from Violin Sonata II BWV 1003—opened the program. He based his edition on the harpsichord version instead, BWV 964, one in which Bach’s ample fleshing-out of harmony and implied counterpoint makes for a fuller musical experience on the guitar.

Two Scarlatti sonatas opened the second half—virtuoso arrangements courtesy of Eliot Fisk and Manuel Barrueco—and were played without flinching. The remaining works were all by Bach. Suvan’s own arrangement of the Largo from Violin Sonata III, BWV 1005, adding basses to make it sound more like a cantata aria than a solo violin work, was followed by two David Russell arrangements. The famous Wachet auf and the Gigue to a keyboard piece (BWV 825) that appears impossibly complicated on the guitar. Suvan’s apparently easy mastery of this material signaled a musical maturity and instrumental control that was breathtaking.