Adam Brown at the Bermuda Guitar Festival 2011St Andrew’s Church Friday’ May 27.Adam Brown is an unassuming and modest young man who studied the guitar at the Royal Schools of Music (with our own Louise Southwood) and is now firmly launched on an international performing career.His programme for the evening consisted of 16 pieces, the majority from South America with a leavening of jazz and modern classical music. Antonio Lauro (1917-1986) was a Venezuelan composer who abandoned his piano studies for the guitar after he’d heard Agustin Barrios play in a concert.Adam opened with two of his pieces: ‘Virgilio’ and ‘Maria Carolina’. ‘Virgilio’ was a good choice for a starting piece, full of energy and exuberant drive with a complex beat; ‘Maria Carolina’ is a good example of Lauro’s favoured musical form, the waltz. Although melodically quite straightforward, Lauro’s treatment of the form is complex, consisting of rapid arpeggiation, blocs of legato chords and wide travel, all perfectly executed by Adam.Between the two Lauro pieces was the melancholic and wistful ‘Preludio de Adios’ (Prelude to Goodbye) by the modern Venezuelan composer Alfonso Montes (1955 -).Next, ‘Campero’, (In the Open) a piece by the Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla (1921 - 1992) from his suite of five pieces for guitar. Although Piazzolla is famous for his dance music which re-energised the tango form, he also wrote works for the classical guitar.This is a technically demanding piece particularly in its use of harmonics and repetition to convey a building emotional intensity. The next piece, by the English composer Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989), ‘Theme and Variations Op 77’ has been recorded by Adam in 2009.It is aggressively modern and uses similar echo technique to Benjamin Britten’s ‘Nocturne’, except that, as Adam pointed out, the theme starts rather than ends the work.I think it’s impossible to do this work justice with one concert hearing other than to say that it is hauntingly lyrical in the third variation.I’ll buy the CD and get to know it better. A historical coincidence: both Piazzolla and Lennox Berkeley studied composition with the same teacher, Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) in Paris.Adam then changed the mood again with five jazz standards; modern New Yorker Frederic Hand’s ‘Missing Her’, an interesting self-referential idea conveying the meaning of ‘missing’ by using incomplete phrases.He then played two pieces by Jimmy Van Heusen (1913-1990), a prolific theatre composer of many hit tunes in the 1930s to 50s.The first, ‘Darn that Dream’ from a 1939 Broadway show and the second the 1944 ‘Like Someone in Love’.One does not often get to hear these tunes outside the jazz context, and despite the connection in my mind of Van Heusen’s music (such as ‘Love and Marriage’) with dreadfully wholesome and unmemorable 1950s Doris Day movies, maybe this is music, sheared of those cheesy associations, whose time is coming again.Rodgers and Hart’s ‘My Romance’ and George Shearing’s ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ finished the first half.A brilliant performance of Cuban Leo Brouwer’s (1939 - ) ‘Landscape with Bells’ started the second half.Adam explained that this was a sound painting in which Brouwer was conveying the random sounds of cow bells in the meadows around his home. It’s quite an experience.Brouwer brings all sorts of percussive and unusual techniques into the piece, including re-tuning the guitar, left hand plucking and harmonics.The result is a continually changing and shifting sound, sometimes building and then fading, perfectly conveying the utter peacefulness of random sounds of animals as they move and graze in the landscape.Spanish composer Francisco Tarrega’s (1852 - 1909) ‘Capricio Arabe’ was next, written as an acknowledgment by the composer of the influence that Arab/Moorish culture has had on Spanish music.The piece is wonderfully atmospheric and dramatic, with a faint eroticism in the dance movement, almost seven veils-ish, beautifully conveyed by Adam. Next, two pieces by the Paraguayan composer Agustin Barrios (1885 - 1944), ‘Barcarola’ and ‘Waltz No 4’.These are the same pieces that Steve Crawford played for us [on Thursday] in the first concert of the current festival.But there’s never too much of a good thing here. These pieces show Barrios at his most tender and lyrical in the Barcarola and at his most technically brilliant in the waltz.One wonders if the young Lauro heard a Barrios’ waltz or two at that fateful concert in Venezuela.Adam finished the evening with two compositions by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), ‘Schottisch-Choro’ and ‘Choro No 1’. Adam made an interesting point about the ‘Scottish’ song.Apparently the musical influence of the Scots who settled in Patagonia in the 19th century worked its way northward and made itself felt eventually in Brazil, and was used by Villa-Lobos in the piece.And it does have a faint trace of Scottish song forms and phraseology embedded in it. I thought I heard an echo of ‘The Campbells Are Coming’, perhaps.A standing ovation brought Adam back out to give us Lauro’s ‘Negrita’ waltz as an encore.