The Space Between

Solstice Guitar Duo (Clancy Anderson and Dominic Ward) have the rare gift of balancing fierce technical command with a warmth that makes the room exhale. They play like musicians who know exactly what they’re doing, but speak to their audience like humans who simply love sharing good music. As a result, The Space Between was a program built on colour, contrast, and emotional breadth, and the duo delivered it with focus, elegance and an easy, grounded charm between pieces.

The duo eased us into the show gently with Egberto Gismonti’s Água e Vinho. The phrasing felt like a kind of exhale; a quiet meditation where jazz-kissed harmonies and flowing tirando arpeggios created an almost harp-like tone. The duo played with understated poise: unhurried, transparent, and deeply atmospheric. Every emotion in this work played across their faces as well as their instruments, enhancing the mood.

This led into Granados’ Danza Española, featuring Orientale and Rondalla Aragonesa. In Orientale, the duo captured the brooding, near-vocal quality of the line, letting dark, elastic phrasing stretch against quietly pulsing inner voices. Rondalla Aragonesa swung the pendulum back toward festival brightness. Its folkloric fire — dance rhythms, plucked-ensemble echoes, crisp ornamentation — was handled with rhythmic exuberance. The duo’s articulation had sparkle without brittleness, and the campanella textures rang with a thrilling celebratory lift.

Peter Madlem’s Monte Carlo shifted the palette again. The jolly rhythm and cinematic flavour gave the tune an ease for the listener, while demanding vigilant alertness from the performers. The ever-shifting positions, quick rhythmic changes, alternating melodic roles requiring tight ensemble awareness and nimble technique. The duo shaped its gestures with an elegant clarity, allowing the piece’s harmonic turns and rhythmic buoyancy to land without fuss.

Leonard Grigoryan’s This Time marked the first turn inward: a contemporary work that begins with the hypnotic ticking rhythm. The duo rendered the opening with eerie precision before the music surged into something cinematic — powerful, restless, almost deafening in its emotional weight. Its sudden pivot into an urban, fast-paced pulse brought a visceral sense of modern life’s rush. Amid this, a waterfall-like refrain appeared, cascading in a gentler ripple of sul tasto warmth. Changing time signatures carried the listener as if downstream in a boat without oars: pushed forward by momentum, tension rising and breaking in waves. The pair leaned into its drama with impressive unity.

Sérgio Assad’s Summer Garden Suite bloomed like sunlit foliage. Assad’s hallmarks were there: buoyant syncopation, intricate counterpoint and harmonies that shimmered like heat over stone. Anderson and Ward shaped the suite with crisp slurs, agile arpeggios, and subtle percussive colouring, letting each movement unfold with the naturalness of a story told by someone who knows the terrain intimately.

Then came the title work — Tara Lynam’s The Space Between — and it was a highlight. A contemplation of those suspended moments in life that masquerade as stagnation but are, in truth, spaces for growth. The piece opened with deep anchoring chords before a dreamlike melody drifted above. A second voice replied, the two guitars conversing like thoughts in gentle counterpoint. Suddenly the music quickened, slipping into a cinematic chase-like fugue of foreboding momentum, evoking The Tea Party’s textured guitar writing. The duo navigated the shifts — from tension to reflection, defiance to hope — with clarity and expressive restraint. The work’s play with texture and pacing felt sophisticated, and their interpretation made its emotional architecture easy to follow.

Paulo Bellinati’s Jongo brought the audience snapping back into earth and body. Rhythm was the star here: percussive rasgueado, tambor effects, sharply defined syncopation and bass lines that kicked like a heartbeat. It was exuberant, virtuosic, and performed with the kind of tight and joyful energy that makes music truly infectious.

Leonard Grigoryan’s Distance returned us to introspection. It’s a tender tale of longing, where the two characters represented by the guitars begin apart, come together briefly in a glowing convergence, then drift away again. Anderson and Ward played it with patience and emotional transparency, letting the counterpoint breathe in the spaces that mattered most.

The encore, Jorge Morel’s Danza Brasilera, was a perfect final flourish — a compact firecracker of Latin verve. Crisp scale passages, bright arpeggios and buoyant syncopation lit up the room, sending the audience out the door with exactly the kind of joy an encore should spark.

Taken as a whole, The Space Between showcased Solstice Guitar Duo at their most compelling: two outstanding classical guitarists whose technical assurance never smothers the music’s emotional pulse. They played with acute attention to detail, enviable focus, and a generosity that made even the most complex repertoire feel welcoming. As a student of the instrument, it was thrilling to see such difficult guitar techniques executed with such finesse.

Kitty Goodall