Guitar quartet brings Latin flair to Kingston concert From the Kingston Daily Freeman / By Kitty Montgomery / Reviewer Sunday, February 12, 2006 EVER SINCE somebody held Orpheus' stringed lyre against a resonating board, ladies and the rest of us have been seduced by men who play guitars. In recent centuries, some have been taken by "macho muchachos" serenading under balconies, but many, many more are drawn to the solitary player, sharing secrets in psychic solitude with the svelte-shaped stringed box that sings to his touch. We sigh, we swoon to be the recipient of these intricate, tender intimacies that draw our deepest soul. So imagine the effect of four such masters of guitar eliciting the dancing, romantic heart of South American music in the vaulted sanctuary of Church of the Holy Cross on the afternoon of Feb. 5. They were members of the Argentina-based Santa Fe Guitar Quartet, summoned to Kingston on the last stop of an international tour for the commencement of the 2006 Ulster Chamber Music Series. The series’ committee is chaired by trombonist, concert basso and pedagogue Tom Keene, who has stirred up much fine music in the philharmonic and academic circles of the Hudson Valley. The Santa Fe quartet is comprised of "two Argentineans and two gringos," as Mariano Fontana, who set aside a law degree to reunite with his musical passion, tells it. Miguel Piva, first-prize recipient of Argentina’s Mozartium Guitar Competition and an Astor Piazzolla aficionado, is, like Fontana, a South American native. Japanese-born Eric Slavin comes to guitar music through a Hungarian piano teacher and was coached in the South American guitar repertoire by the eminent figures Abel Carlevaro and Guido Santorsola. The Georgia boy in their midst, Christopher Dorsey began formal picking in his home state and in Nashville before heading to the flamenco caves of Granada and tango-heavy Buenos Aires. There are universities in the United States, such as Arizona State, that wisely provide grants for such endeavors. It is doubtless Dorsey's influence that accounts for the group’s fulminating “new grass” deliverance of a traditional Kentucky pickin’ tune as an encore. Their ensemble can and does perform classic Baroque material, but on this day it shared four pieces by Latin American composers. First up among them, was Paquito D'Rivera's "Tres Piezas Latinoamericanas" respectively conveying folkdance music of Mexico in "Wapango"; the Afro-Creole flavored "Cuban Danzon"; and a waltz, "Vals Venezolano," honoring Venezuelan composer Antonio Lauro. Roland Dyens' five-piece composition commemorating the presence of friends and his native land "Tunisie," was followed by Dos Piezas Folkloricas Argentinas, arranged for the quartet by Marcelo Coronel. The group added another of Coronel's settings, realized, as all the music offered was, in a nuanced exchange rising beyond articulate meshing of rhythm and lyrical, effervescent solo lines to wake the flavor and essence that the dream and dance contained. Reverence, shared among the players, was for the most profound realization of intangibles conceived in the composers' works. THEN THERE was the quartet’s levitation of Piazzolla's "The Four Seasons." The music of this great Argentinean composer is a life study and the Piva has made it his passion. Piazzolla’s homage to Vivaldi, Piva tells us, is conceived in, a country that has no seasons and enjoys sensual, climactic ambiance. So we get some structure reminiscent of Baroque, a shiver of winter and much that is Piazzolla's "nuevo tango." Tango is dream access to all hope, all hunger of yearning humanity creating, riding a surf of passion and inclusive of carnal romance. Once you expand the soul to its dimension as a musician, a dancer or a witness, you yearn forever to hang in its thrall. For the duration of the quartet’s impassioned possession by Piazzolla's score, when each master seemed released to his fullest power, the audience was swept up with them.