The first concert in the eighth Bermuda guitar festival featured faculty from the Bermuda School of Music guitar teachers Steve Crawford and Louise Southwood and violin teacher David France. They gave us a dozen composers' works from three continents (Asia, Europe, America) ranging across five centuries of repertoire and including the world premiere performance of a new work.Ms Southwood's solo pieces, notable for their diversity, were ‘Cavatina' by British film composer Stanley Myers, (used as the theme tune for the 1978 film ‘The Deer Hunter'), ‘Fantasy' by the baroque lute composer Sylvius Leopold Weiss, and Italian Carlo Domeniconi's Turkish-influenced ‘Variations on an Anatolian Folk Song'. Louise's playing is technically perfect, emotionally precise and easy to listen to, allowing us to experience the music fully and in a relaxed way. She gave ‘Cavatina' a harp-like sonority which fits well with the romanticism of this piece; the Weiss ‘Fantasy' had a bit of baroque swagger to it, fitting for the huntin' shootin' types at the Dresden ducal court of the 1700s for whom it was composed. Carlos Domeniconi fell in love with Turkish music while teaching classical guitar in Istanbul in the 1980s. His compositions are a genuine fusion of Eastern and Western music and the guitar sound sometimes approaches that of the three-stringed Turkish lute, the saz, sometimes that of the North Indian dulcimer the santoor, through the use of judicious tunings and careful plucking technique. Mr France then took the stage with Ms Southwood and their programme commenced with the wistful Romanian folk dance by Bartok, Buciumeana. The violin and guitar are good musical partners; the guitar's percussive and plucked baritone contrasting with the violin's bowed sustained soprano. Mr France moves to the music and somehow uses his body to show us the phraseology of the pieces; he and Ms Southwood are in complete accord as to the emotional subtleties of each piece. The Bartok was followed by ‘Nightclub 1960' by Argentinian composer Astor Piazolla, inventor of the ‘New Tango'. Full of sly mischief, showy sliding dance steps and implied knowing sidelong glances interspersed with ironic sentimentality, the piece included some dazzling work from both musicians such as percussion and extreme legato on the guitar and violin harmonics so high they approached the limits of audibility.Next, the world premiere composition, ‘From Summer to Fall', commissioned by Mr France and Ms Southwood from Douglas Lora, one half of the Brazilian Guitar Duo who are regular performers at the Bermuda Guitar Festival. A courante-like introduction leads into a jaunty waltz figure. The music then turns more autumnal with the use of tremolo passages on both instruments giving an image of falling leaves. The main theme then returns. ‘From Summer to Fall' is an effective piece of imagery which will add to the violin and guitar repertory. Finally Ms Southwood and Mr France played ‘Pompeya' from Argentinian Maximo Diego Pujol's Buenos Aires suite. As Ms Southwood explained, this suburb of Buenos Aires being named after the town of Pompeii, the music is a bit “explosive”. The applause turned louder and louder, punctuated by whistles and whoops and morphed into a standing ovation for Ms Southwood and Mr France. The celebration was also tinged with sadness: Ms Southwood departs Bermuda for Canada in July and this is her final concert as a member of the Bermuda School of Music. Mr France and Ms Southwood have forged a unique and original Bermuda musical presence.We all hope that they will return to the stage here in Bermuda in future years. They were persuaded to return to play Granados' ‘Spanish Dance No 5' as an encore. It's a great choice for violin and guitar with its insistent and driving guitar rhythm and the violin's soaring melodic lines subtly changing between E major and minor.The second half of the evening was performed by Mr Crawford who gave us seven major works from the Repertory: 16th century English composer John Dowland's ‘Frog Galliard', 19th century Spanish composer Fernando Sor's ‘Variations on a theme by Mozart', and from the 20th century, ‘Vals No 4' and ‘Barcarola', by Paraguayan Agustin Barrios, two pieces from Spanish Joaqin Turina's ‘Homenaje a Tarrega' and Isaac Albeniz' ‘Rumores de la Caleta'.Mr Crawford is a careful, sensitive and concentrated player who feels his way into the music and delivers interpretations to us which are artistically sound, crisply delivered and deeply considered. The Dowland particularly has bars of blazingly fast triplets that have to be perfectly executed as well as more languid dance passages and an overall tinge of the composer‘s overarching sadness. Mr Crawford delivered this to us. Of the ‘Frog Galliard' my wife Liz wondered if it could have been about a French person. Having dismissed her comment as frivolous, I now stand corrected. The world authority on Dowland's music states that there is a possibility that the piece is a reference to the French duke of Alencon, an ardent admirer of Queen Elizabeth the first who called him ‘my frog' and those same triplets are to be found in contemporary French music but not in English galliards of the time. Mr Crawford described Fernando Sor's ‘Variations' as a ‘jackpot' composition, one of composer's best and most popular sets of variations. The theme is from the end of act one of Mozart's' Magic Flute' and although it's structurally straightforward, even simple, using tonic/dominant in an entirely predictable way, Sor takes it, chops it, dices, slices and de- and reconstructs the phrasing, rhythms and moods into a series of progressively more and more dazzling technical flourishes, turning the theme into a major concert performance piece.Agustin Barrios' ‘Vals No 4' and ‘Barcarola' give us two contrasting moods of this fascinating and complex composer, known to the West really only since John Williams' ‘discovery' of him in the 1970s. The waltz shows the composer at his most brilliant and technical, with complex bass and treble interaction and blazingly fast arpeggiation; ‘Barcarola' is dreamy and drifty and informed by huge tenderness. Mr Crawford gave us both of these moods perfectly.Joaquin Turina's (1882-1949) ‘Homage to Tarrega' is a tribute to Francisco Tarrega (1852-1909) who alone and almost single-handedly is responsible for the existence of the modern Spanish classical guitar and also composed large amounts of its repertory. Turina's approach in his homage is to use flamenco forms and rasgueado, thumb work, string damping and percussion effects. Mr Crawford finished with Isaac Albeniz's ‘Rumores de la Caleta' (Sounds of the Harbour). It's an impressionistic piece combining a number of flamenco techniques including left hand ‘hammering', ie creating rapid series of notes without using the right hand, the whole creating an atmosphere of exuberance, activity and fun.A standing ovation brought Mr Crawford back to perform Scott Tennant's beautiful arrangement of the Scottish love song, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme'.