The New York Times on Guitar Marathon: Bach:

The lutenist Paul O’Dette, who assembled the marathon with David Spelman, the festival’s artistic director, opened the afternoon session with the Lute Suite in A minor (BWV 995) in a delicate, fluid rendering that embraced both the free-spirited, almost improvisatory nature of the Prelude and the stylistic formality of the dance movements. Here and in his performance of the Sonata in G minor (BWV 1001, originally for unaccompanied violin), which opened the evening concert, Mr. O’Dette played with a crispness that overcame the gentleness of the lute’s sound and clarified the counterpoint within textures that, in other hands, often seem merely chordal.

Mr. O’Dette also performed two movements by Sylvius Leopold Weiss, a lute-playing friend and contemporary of Bach’s, partly as a way of setting up the one nonplucked performance of the evening, a robust account of the Suite for Violin and Harpsichord (BWV 1025) by the violinist Robert Mealy and the harpsichordist Avi Stein. The point here was that the harpsichord part in the Bach is, except in its opening Fantasia, a direct transcription of the Weiss sonata from which Mr. O’Dette played excerpts.

The other lutenist on hand, Nigel North, matched and at times surpassed Mr. O’Dette in textural clarity in his performance of the Cello Suite No. 4 (BWV 1010). Mr. O’Dette and Mr. North also joined forces to close the marathon with another Weiss work, the spirited, bustling Sonata in C for two lutes.

Two of the youngest stars of the guitar world, Jason Vieaux and Ana Vidovic, offered strikingly contrasting back-to-back performances during the afternoon concert. Mr. Vieaux gave the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro (BWV 998) a stately, sharply articulated and subtly driven reading, in which the closing Allegro gradually took on the exciting qualities of a perpetual-motion piece.

Read the full review here.

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