GUITARRA is a concert of showcasing four different styles of acoustic guitar playing. The headline act is Paco Pena, the great Spanish flamenco guitarist, along with classical guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan, blues guitarist Phil Manning and jazz player Jim Pennell. 

This Canberra show was the first of a short national tour and there was a slight clumsiness about the presentation, which should sort itself out over the next few concerts. This did not detract from the quality of the music, which was of the highest order throughout. Each act was allowed 20-25 minutes solo, with a couple of combinations and a massed finale.

The showed opened with Phil Manning (although you had to know who he was, as no-one was introduced) with a set of acoustic blues songs. His style is of the modern blues fingerpickers, a distilled and more technical playing than the black blues guitarist of the 1930s, with the rough rhythmical edges polished away.

Manning was followed by the Grigoryan brothers who delighted with their set of some of their own compositions, some arrangements for two guitars of non-guitar pieces and a little Brazilian music. The tightness of their duo playing is quite superb. It is almost as if their was one person playing music which would be impossible to play on one guitar. At the end of their set they were joined by Manning for a blues standard, which included a smooth and lyrical solo from Leonard Grigoryan.

The second half of the concert opened with Jim Pennell who plays jazz arrangements on a fingerpicked nylon string guitar in a style most associated with Brazilian music and American players such as Chet Atkins. It is complex and technically challenging music but without much in the way of dynamics. It worked better with a couple of Brazilian tunes by Jobim and Luiz Bonfa than with highly arranged jazz standards.

The last performer was Paco Pena, whose set built in intensity through the four pieces he played. There is an emotion in his music which raises him above the rest and I suspect the audience could have happily taken more of it. He was joined by Pennell for one piece and then all five guitarists shared the stage for a couple of final works. The first was a slow flamenco piece which was a little hesitant, but unexpectedly followed by the well known Recuerdos de la Alhambra. There was some clever separation and allocation of the lines in the music but it worked better than it might have and was a satisfying end to a most entertaining and diverse night of guitar music.

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