A few days before his debut concert for the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society, Solomon Silber asked me if he could play his program at my store as a warm-up.  I assured him that nothing would please me more, as long as he didn't mind occasional interruptions by customers.  Well, he played his program of works by Domenico Scarlatti, J.S. Bach, Isaac Albeniz and Benjamin Britten and he played it well.  He was indeed interrupted from time to time, which did not seem to faze him in the least.  The three, then four, then five people who stayed to listen were delighted to hear such great music played so beautifully in the confines of The Classical Guitar Store.

      The first thing I said to Solomon after his masterly  concert on January 23 at the Settlement Music School was, "Solly, I think you play better before 300 people than you do before three people," and he instantly agreed.  For it is true that, as competently as he played at the guitar store, his performance before  a packed house was nothing less than inspired.

      He had chosen for his program two of the longest and most demanding pieces in the guitar repertoire, Bach's Chaconne and Britten's Nocturnal. The technical demands of these works is extreme, but even more difficult is the sequential dramatic development of these two monumental sets of variations on a theme. The Chaconne takes for its theme a common 18th century air which is stated at the outset draped in heavy D minor chords and then run through every imaginable metamorphosis, from lilting lines to head-spinning arpeggiation.

      The Nocturnal reverses the customary practice of beginning with the theme and starts with the variations that wend their way through landscapes of sound tinted with all the 20th century musical colors, from lush impressionism to the atonal nightmarish penultimate episode that melts finally into the theme of John Dowland's Come Gentle Sleep. To play these pieces effectively it takes great mastery of all the resources of the guitar as well as an artistic grasp of the broad relationships embedded in the music. These, young Mr. Silber demonstrated to a wonderful degree. His control and comprehension were worthy of a much more experienced (i.e. older) player. He has obviously played through these works and thought over their structures and meanings at great length. His were mature and moving renditions by any standard.

      He opened his program with four lovely Scarlatti sonatas originally written for harpsichord and transcribed by well-known Philadelphia guitarist Alan Krantz who happens also to be Solomon's teacher. There is no shortage of transcribed Scarlatti sonatas for guitar performed by Segovia, Barbosa-Lima, Barrueco and Williams, to name a few, who have thus paid guitaristic tribute to this prolific Italian keyboardist transplanted to Spain. The four played by here are all new and were duly welcome. Solomon's program ended with the full enchantment of Spain in three works of Isaac Albeniz, another keyboard composer whose pieces sound just as good on the guitar and even gain a special appropriate sonority. Solomon gave beautiful expression to the graceful Granada, the rough and tumble Cataluņa and the fiery Sevilla. The large audience, clearly thrilled by the evening's performance, asked for and got two encores, an Etude by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Tarrega's evocative Caprichio Arabe. Whether he plays for three, three hundred or three thousand, Solomon Silber has what it takes to touch and delight an audience.