[Harp-L] Changing the perception, one symphony at a time

[Robert Bonfiglio <bon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Harmonica helps tear down walls
Low and high art collide at latest symphony performance

Monday, March 7, 2005

By GARY PANETTA

of the Journal Star
A Review

PEORIA - A harmonica player? The blues? Selections from Elvis Presley?

This is supposed to be the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, right?

Among the cheering, clapping, appreciative audience members Saturday 
night, I suspect there were at least a few purists who left grumbling 
about the music of Richard Wagner and Bedrich Smetana having to share 
the stage with rock 'n' roll and a harmonica virtuoso named Robert 
Bonfiglio.

I was not among them. I liked hearing that artificial, arbitrary wall 
of separation dividing high art and popular culture totter and fall, if 
only this once. Grungy, nasty, foot-stomping, wailing harmonica blues 
made a fitting combination with the likes of Wagner, a composer hardly 
famous for his restraint.

At any rate, Bonfiglio is to the harmonica what Paganini was to the 
violin (Bonfiglio's long hair even reminded me a little of an artist's 
rendering of the Italian virtuoso), and I for one couldn't hear enough 
of him. Neither, apparently, could audience members, who responded with 
refreshing, low-art enthusiasm - clapping their hands, stomping their 
feet and cheering whether Bonfiglio was performing Elvis Presley's 
"Hound Dog" or traditional blues.

Such is the harmonica's accustomed territory. A three-movement bona 
fide classical concerto isn't the harmonica's usual stomping ground, 
but you would be shocked how compelling the instrument sounds: as 
virtuosic as a violin but with a difference. The difference is a pure, 
eerie quality that composer Heitor Villa-Lobos exploits to the fullest 
in the opening of his Concerto for Harmonica. Bonfiglio's performance - 
full of slurs, rapid scales and percussive intensity - was a tour de 
force.