PERFORMING ARTS

Berta Rojas

Agustín Pío Barrios was one of the 20th century's most intriguing -- not to say eccentric -- composers. Born in Paraguay in 1885, he spent a frustrating career as a guitarist-composer, often mocked for his unconventional repertoire and for using metal guitar strings rather than the conventional gut. A true original (he was the first classical guitarist to make recordings), Barrios also reinvented himself in his mid-40s as a Guarani tribal chief, performing in native costume and calling himself Cacique Nitsuga Mangoré, "the Paganini of the guitar from the jungles of Paraguay."

Barrios died, largely unsung, in 1944. But he left behind some of the most engaging and beautifully crafted guitar music ever written, and on Saturday evening the gifted Paraguayan guitarist Berta Rojas presented an all-Barrios program at Westmoreland Congregational Church, as part of the always interesting John E. Marlow Guitar Series.

Rojas clearly has Barrios's music deeply in her blood; playing entirely from memory, she traversed the composer's stylistic range, from the poignant "El Ultimo Canto" through classically inspired works like "Estudio de Concierto" and "Allegro Sinfonico" to pieces like "Julia Florida" and "Jha che Valle" (with their roots in Latina American folk music) and Barrios's extraordinarily beautiful masterpiece, "La Catedral."

And when Rojas is at her best, there may be no better Barrios interpreter alive. Often in the faster works, she tended to push tempos to the brink, smearing the details. But on the whole, these were intimate, introspective performances (the moving "Choro de Saudade" seemed to come directly from her heart), rich in subtle colors and intuitive understanding of Barrios's complex personality.

-- Stephen Brookes

Walden Chamber Players

How is one to respond to a piece of music conceived as the soundscape of an intensely personal and spiritual inner world? Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina's 1980 "Garden of Joys and Sorrows" for flute, viola and harp is such a piece, and three members of the Walden Chamber Players made it the centerpiece of their program at the Corcoran Gallery on Friday.

Outwardly, it's crafted in a language that is all Gubaidulina's own, full of slides up and down individual harp strings, long eerie passages of viola harmonics, laced with quarter tones and a slowly developing flute part that is firmly anchored in more recognizable flute idioms. Its colors run the gamut from the muted hues of the early impressionists to the brilliance of Stravinsky, and it projects a quiet but powerful intensity. Clearly, however, Gubaidulina intends a deeper message than this, and to perceive it fully, perhaps you already have to inhabit the spiritual world she lives in.

Flutist Marianne Gedigian, violist Christof Huebner and harpist Franziska Huhn took it (and all its technical quirks) on, with a reassuring poise that avoided any hint of trickiness or difficulty.

The rest of the program offered a nicely structured frame for Gubaidulina's trio. There was the Elegiac Trio for Flute, Viola and Harp by Arnold Bax in a sort of Cesar Franck idiom, an agreeable Duo for Flute and Viola by the 18th-century François Devienne, and Debussy's late and intensely crafted Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, all given splendid readings.

-- Joan Reinthaler