“Too much of a good thing,” purred Mae West in her customary tone of steamy innuendo, “can be wonderful.” By this logic, an ensemble of four classical guitarists performing together is divine compared to a lone soloist.

The Brazilian Guitar Quartet.

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But after hearing the first-rate Brazilian Guitar Quartet perform Thursday (January 28) at the La Jolla Athenaeum, I’m unconvinced that more is necessarily better. There is no doubt that the gentlemen from Brazil brought ample technical acuity and musicianly insight to their repertory, but at times, the whole sounded less than the sum of its parts.

The quartet’s strongest suit was their arrangement of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1,” a three-movement suite (originally for cellos) of traditional Brazilian musical styles reinvented by Villa-Lobos in his own rambunctious neo-Baroque counterpoint. In the lively opening movement, an “embolada,” the guitars created a lively street corner scene where competing musicians attempted to outplay one another in their individual interpretations of an angular tune. The guitarists stressed the composer's piquant harmonies and made each variation strut more boldly than the previous.

In the rhapsodic middle movement, a “modinha,” the competition vanished and was replaced by pulsing, ardent solos accompanied by suitably deft arpeggiation. Making his homage to Bach unabashed, Villa-Lobos cast the final movement as a fugue, whose dense textures the quartet crafted with skill and passion.

Opening their concert with J. S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major made sense on paper as an introduction to Villa-Lobos’ suite, but I found their Bach transcription weak. Bach’s colorful Thrid Suite calls for trumpets, oboes and timpani in addition to the strings, and I could not hear the composer’s courtly brilliance in the guitars’ tepid counterpoint, which was busy and academic.

Six movements from Isaac Albéniz’s magnum opus “Iberia” formed the concert’s second half, an ambitious undertaking that proved the performers’ virtuoso credentials. A large, technically daunting work for solo piano (there are 12 separate pictorial movements in the piano original) completed just before the composer’s demise in 1909, “Iberia” gave the guitarists every opportunity to exploit contrasting colors, dance rhythms, and endearing nationalistic traits.

It did not take much of an imaginative leap to conjure ships in the sunny harbor of Cádiz (“El Puerto”), the intense arabesques in the architecture of Jerez (“Jerez”), or the partying dancers of Seville (“Eritaña”) in this animated performance.

But just because one can occasionally hear in the music of Albéniz the strum of the guitar does not mean it will become excellent guitar music. Four guitars cannot suggest the vivid sonic range of a piano, nor its ability to build and sustain sound. No matter how well-played, the pinpoint sound of the guitar is always quickly dying away. Hearing this arrangement of “Iberia” only made me long for a pianist and a concert grand.

Everything on the program was an arrangement of music intended for other instruments, and I suggest this is part of the problem. Perhaps they should follow the example of the Romeros, the first internationally successful guitar quartet, and exploit more guitar literature. Secondly, they should commission music written expressly for their combination of guitars to obtain more idiomatic and persuasive works for their concerts.

The members of the Brazilian Guitar Quartet are Everton Gloeden and Luiz Mantovani on eight-string guitar and Clemer Andreotti and Tadeu do Amaral on six-string guitar.

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