On Thursday April 29th, 2021 I had the opportunity to see the premiere of Edwin Guevara Gutierrez’s “ Ibero-American Landscapes”. It was performed in Crowder Hall of the Fred Fox School of Music at the University of Arizona and was held as an in person and livestream event to attend. I unfortunately could not attend the performance in person however, attended the livestream and found myself enjoying the overall performance.
In a typical performance you see the performers tune their instruments and press on to perform their piece to their audience. With “Ibero-American Landscapes”, the audience had the opportunity to witness a dress rehearsal right before the final production. It was interesting to see the quartet play portions of the piece and fine tuning and changing some areas of the score. An intriguing portion of the performance. It gave a short preview of what they were going to play whilst giving insight to how a musician may interact with other musicians to improve a piece.
Once the performance began the most prominent thing I had noticed was how beautifully the four instruments sound together. The flute added a light feeling while the cello added dramatics as the guitars spoke. What was most alluring about the piece was the presence of fingerstyle in the guitar. I tend to be a fan of such a playstyle and it seems to tie in the unity of all the parts in the score. There are parts where the music fluctuates from a gentle and delicate instrumentation to an aggressive and perhaps urgently overwhelming one, capturing your attention and drawing you further in to the music. The transitions from one composition to the next meld together seamlessly and while each piece has a different style and sound to it that you can clearly distinguish, it seems to all fit together and still seem like one entire song in separate parts.
An important fact to note about the performance is the score itself, which was made using notes and chords that spell out the names of each musician in the quartet, giving the piece a sentimental value and style to each of the songs on the agenda. This also allows for a interesting pattern of notes to be used throughout the piece and, in my opinion, makes the score unique as a whole.
“ Ibero-American Landscapes” was a performance worth attending the premiere for. The score demonstrated the talents of its musicians and the talent of Gutierrez as a composer and has proved to be an excellent addition to the world of music.
