Third Time’s a Charm for Pepe Romero at Long Beach

Guitarist Pepe Romero, Music Director Eckart Preu and members of the Long Beach Symphony
after their performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

… Well, third time for this writer at least (reviews here and here of Pepe Romero’s most recent concerts with the Long Beach Symphony) but doubtless many more times for longer-standing patrons of the orchestra and indeed the countless fans who have been enjoying the Romeros’ music-making for decades, many of whom must have been in the Terrace Theater for the LBSO’s February concert in the 2025-2026 Classical season, to judge by the ovation that greeted the great Spanish guitarist when he came onto the platform with Music Director Eckart Preu for a pre-concert chat.

Whereas on those two previous occasions he had played relatively unfamiliar works by his father Celedonio Romero (1913-1996) and Manolo Sanlúcar (1943-2022), this time around it was to be that most familiar of guitar concertos, the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999).

Pepe Romero talked about his own friendship with Rodrigo, and then related how the concerto’s slow movement is said to have been written in reaction to the miscarriage of the Rodrigos’ first child (it’s only fair to note that some documentary evidence seems to contradict this attribution but, to quote the famous final line from the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”).

Rodrigo in 1935.

The performance itself was notably spacious, taking some 27 minutes when the average for the work is 22-23 minutes, and I did feel that the exceptionally measured pace for the outer movements (marked Allegro con brio and Allegro gentile respectively) sought an expressive weight that their relatively simple and repetitive structures are not really up to handling. The celebrated Adagio, however, whatever its provenance, was hypnotic in its gradual unfolding, from Joseph Stone’s heart-tugging opening English horn solo to the grand final statement of the main theme by Rodrigo’s full (though modest) orchestral forces and into the poignant coda.

As for Romero’s account of the solo part, it combined a sense of complete identification and ownership with an improvisatory flexibility that must at times have challenged Maestro Preu’s accompanying skills, but which, particularly in the Adagio, induced an almost preternatural hush in the capacity audience. Preu’s (unmarked) attacca between it and the finale neutralized any mood-shattering applause, and this very special partnership between soloist, conductor, and orchestra was rewarded with an instant standing ovation, only stilled by Pepe Romero’s return to the platform to play his father’s Fantasia Cubana as encore.

Gabriela Lena Frank at the time of writing Elegía Andina.

The concert had opened, as so often in Eckart Preu’s programming, with a more-or-less contemporary piece that must have been unfamiliar to orchestra and audience alike. This was Elegía Andina (2000), the first orchestral work by Gabriela Lena Frank (b.1972)—Californian by birth but of very mixed ethnic heritage. Composed for modest forces (double winds, horns and trumpets, timpani, percussion, and strings: 8-6-4-4-3 in this performance) but still conjuring some imposing sounds, Elegía Andina is a response to the sounds and influences from the Peruvian strand in Frank’s ancestry.

In some introductory words Maestro Preu likened it to a day in the jungle, with early on some passages for flute to imitate the zampoña, a traditional Andean pan flute, played with atmospheric spontaneity by Heather Clark against woodblock interjections (Brian Cannady single-handedly wielding a formidable array of percussion throughout the work’s 12 minutes). Overall, it reminded me a little of both Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía india (played a few years ago at Long Beach) and some of Villa-Lobos’s native-inspired works—and there was definitely a strand of The Rite of Spring detectable in its DNA as Elegía Andina gathered force. Played with the LBSO’s customary skill and commitment under Preu’s expert direction, this was a thoroughly worthwhile introduction to Gabriela Lena Frank’s work.

After the interval, there was no expansion of the orchestra for some late-Romantic blockbuster, but rather a two-fold experiment. First, would the small forces of Baroque music lose impact hopelessly in the voluminous expanse of the Terrace Theater? Second, given that the chosen work was Handel’s Water Music, exactly what to play? Despite the fame of the recently enthroned King George I’s 1717 “booze cruise” on the Thames (as Maestro Preu entertainingly dubbed it in his pre-performance remarks), for which the 32-year-old Handel provided music at the express royal wish, exactly what was played, by what instruments, and in what order, is lost to history.

No manuscripts in Handel’s own hand have survived, and for most of the 18th century a multiplicity of copies, keyboard arrangements and part-publications circulated until what was presumably the entire then extant set of 22 pieces was published as three suites in full score in 1788. With a total playing time of around 50 minutes, clearly so many brief items one after the other in a concert setting would prove wearisome, so Maestro Preu decided on the opening few numbers of Suite No. 1 in F major, HWV 348, followed by all five movements of Suite No. 2 in D major, HWV 349. 

Painting by Edouard Hamman (1819–1888) depicting Handel (gesturing with his right arm at
the adjacent musicians) with George I on the royal barge, July 17, 1717.

From the moment the LBSO strings swung into the Ouverture to Suite No. 1 it was clear that any concern about lack of impact was a non-starter. Despite its Largo marking this combined all the necessary majesty and vigor, confirmed by the joyous contrapuntal duetting of the two concertino violins (Agnes Gottschewski and Chloé Tardif) in the movement’s main Allegro section. In the following Adagio e staccato the pair of oboes (Rong-Huey Liu and Joseph Stone) keened expressively, while the untitled third movement introduced the enthusiastically braying horns of Preston Shepard and Adrian Dunker.

And so it continued, with the two trumpets (David Pitel and David Scott) slicing through the orchestral texture from the outset of Suite No. 2. The famous Alla Hornpipe induced a quiet audience sigh of familiarity, and inter-movement applause throughout the performance testified to its success. Indeed, I wonder if some, having noted the program listing of Suites 1 & 2 (~47 minutes), might have felt a bit short-changed when Maestro Preu brought down his baton after about 25 minutes on the water. But if this erred on the side of caution regarding audience engagement over many short Baroque movements, reward came with, as encore, the eternally popular Air on the G String second movement from J. S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068.

The final concert of the Long Beach Symphony's 2025-2026 Classical season will take place on Saturday, June 6, when orchestral forces as large as the LBSO has ever mustered will play Mahler's mighty Fifth Symphony, preceded by Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik—not to be missed!

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, February 28, 2026, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: Sue Moylan for Long Beach Symphony; Rodrigo: joaquin-rodrigo.com; Gabriela Lena Frank: Sabina Frank, courtesy sfcv.org; Handel and George I: Wikimedia Commons.

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