David Leisner, composer, scholar and expert performer was the first night performer of this year’s Bermuda Guitar Festival.

The festival actually opened with afternoon performances from Louise Southwood, festival founder Steven Crawford and friends on Thursday.

Once again the is venue the lovely St. Andrew’s Church, whose builders seemed to have had just these sorts of concerts in mind, so ideal it is, in intimacy and acoustics for this annual event.

Leisner’s scholarship has unearthed two giants of composition for the guitar — Beethoven’s contemporary, the Czechoslovakian born Wenzeslaw Matiegka, who migrated to Vienna, the centre of European Art music of the time and Johann Kaspar Mertz, a Romantic composer, Chopin’s contemporary.

The programme began with Matiegka, whom Leisner called ‘The Beethoven of the guitar’.

An interesting feature of this work, ‘Sonata in B Minor’, is that it has no slow movement, the markings being Allegro con moto, Scherzo-allegro molto and Finale-allegretto.

Leisner has the ability, like the greatest of performers, to make technique so transparent that the music seems almost to come forth of its own accord. His approach is cerebral and emotionally restrained.

JS Bach’s ‘Prelude Fugue and Allegro’ followed.

Written originally perhaps for the lute this was the performer’s own arrangement. It was typical baroque, unmistakably Bachian and executed more with scholarly respect than passion. The rewards of this approach were especially evident in the pieces which followed, by pioneering Black American composer, Scott Joplin.

The guitarist offered first ‘The Chrysanthemum’, followed by ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. The first has an endearing whimsy, that could have come across as sentimental but for Leisner’s restraint. Perhaps owing to its not being as well known to the audience as the latter, the ending seemed to take the attentive audience by surprise. The Rag too, had its own internal pendulum revealed by the guitarist’s careful restraint, it seemed to swing by itself.

After an intermission we heard Leiser’s own ‘Sonata (1998)’, ‘Nel Mezzo. The title comes from Dantes opening of his epic ‘Inferno’; ‘In the middle of the journey—’ (Poets Seamus Heaney and Robert Pinsky both have translations available in book and cassette form, for those interested). Leisner says this work is the outcome of a “mid-life crisis” into which he poured the angst of his soul.

It is marked Urto, Lamento and No! It’s seemingly improvisational nature, with chromatic scalic passages and full handed chords, belies a careful structure.

It is programmatic in the sense that the composer’s intention is to tell a story.

It is about life and, even more death.

So the last movement with its furious opening emphatic chords voices a furious No! It also incorporates and American folk lullaby, the words of which say: ‘Hush abye, don’t you cry Go to sleep by little baby.’ The invitation to ‘sleep’ is refused with a resounding No! The audience loved the music, to judge by their generous applause.

For an encore Leisner played Brazilian Villa-Lobos’ ‘Etude No.12’, with all due fire and sparkle and passion. It seems he’s not all cerebral, after all.