If only I had partaken in a few too many happy hour rum swizzles before I went along to see Michael Chapdelaine at the Bermuda Guitar Festival things would have made more sense.

At least then my rum swizzled-vision would have told me there were three (or more) Chapdelaines on stage knocking out richly adorned versions of popular tunes, faithfully reproducing the nuances of melody, rhythm and lead notes.

What I, and a couple of hundred others, heard at St. Andrew’s Church in Hamilton was the sound of numerous guitars streaming together to create a rich tapestry of sound. But what we saw was one man, New Mexico resident Chapdelaine, alone on stage with a single guitar.

It has taken the best part of 40 years for the American to hone his talent to such an astonishing degree where he can thread multiple melodies simultaneously though the six strings of his classical guitar to create a sound that defies perceived limitations of a lone instrument.

How does he get those sounds out of a guitar? One person wondered if Chapdelaine’s guitar was so special it is probably worth the gross domestic product of a number of small countries.

Interestingly, three of the four Beatles’ tunes with which he warmed up the sell-out audience were from the latter half of the Fab Four’s career and a time when increasing friction within the Beatles unit occasionally caused John Lennon and Paul McCartney to record songs playing all the instruments on their own.

The difference between them and Chapdelaine was that whereas Lennon and McCartney played the various parts of those songs on individual instruments with multiple recordings, Chapdelaine plays all the disparate musical components on his one guitar... and all at the same time.

Exactly 40 years to the day of the release of The Beatles’ ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album, the packed St. Andrew’s Church audience was treated to an inspired instrumental rendition of one of its most instantly recognisable tracks.

A few hundred people had crowded in, sending festival organisers scurrying to find additional foldaway chairs for latecomers as all the pews were jammed packed.

Barely had the audience settled down before Chapdelaine, one of the stars of the 2006 festival, struck up with his second piece of the evening ‘She’s Leaving Home’.

Music had been the most important thing in Chapdelaine’s life until a day in November 1986 when he became a father for the first time and his children became the number one element of his life, he told the audience.

He dreads the day in the near future when his daughter will fly the nest to start her own adult life, and so it was McCartney’s timeless Beatles’ tune that conjured up and encapsulated those feelings for Chapdelaine as he found a way to perform all the elements of the 1967 song on a single instrument.

The American had opened the evening with a short instrumental entitled ‘A Day in Bermuda’ that featured a pleasantly, meandering walking bass line.

His next four songs were interpretations of The Beatles, the aforementioned ‘She’s Leaving Home’, followed by ‘And I Love Her’, ‘Something’ and ‘Come Together’.

It was the complex beauty of George Harrison’s ‘Something’ that sent Chapdelaine, then 13 years-old, on his own musical journey in 1969.

“I wanted to play the solo of ‘Something’ but it had seven chords and I could only play three. There were these crazy chords I could not play,” Chapdelaine told the audience.

He went to music school and so began his training and learning of classical guitar techniques that have taken him around the world in the intervening decades, learning from the likes of France’s Roland Dyens and Spanish maestro Andres Segovia, and becoming the only guitarist to win first prize in the world’s top classical and fingerstyle guitar competitions.

Chapdelaine made such an impressive impact at the 2006 Bermuda Guitar Festival, that those who saw him them returned with their friends — hence the sold-out venue. At this rate, should he return again in 2008, the Anglican Cathedral may have to be booked as an alternative venue.

Favourites such as The Mamas and Papas’ ‘California Dreamin’’, Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’, and Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ were interspersed with Chapdelaine’s own compositions, including a New Mexico restaurant meal inspired ditty Blue Chilli and another about “sun and beer”.

With deft finger flicks, strums, plucks and cleverly timed knocks and bangs to the body of his guitar, Chapdelaine created a mosaic of sound that left many in the audience gasping with delighted disbelief.

The New Mexico visitor was again given a standing ovation at the end of his main set, which was followed by three encores and surely had festival organisers, still breathless from scrambling around for those extra foldaway seats, scrambling again to sign him up for the fifth annual festival next summer.