Rodrigo: Guitar Concertos

The passion of Flamenco blends with the elegance of courtly dances in the most popular guitar concerto of all time: Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.

Listen

On Apple Music, on iTunes, on CD, and on Spotify:

When?

In 1939 Paris, Joaquin Rodrigo composes his Concierto de Aranjuez, as the spectre of European-wide war looms large. Meanwhile:

• In the USA, John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath and Billie Holiday records Strange Fruit.
• An earthquake strikes Chile, killing around 30,000 people.
• On 1 September, Germany invades Poland and World War Two begins. The UK, France, New Zealand, Australia and India declare war on Germany two days later.
• The Spanish Civil War ends: the right-wing Nationalists defeat the leftist Republicans, and General Franco will rule Spain for the next 36 years.
• Ralph Lauren, founder of the Polo Ralph Lauren brand, is born in New York.

Fast Facts

• Despite a history dating back to the middle ages, it’s only in the past 100 years or so that composers have started to write concertos for it. It was in Spain that the guitar’s move into the spotlight began, as composers searching for a truly ‘Spanish’ musical style became excited at the potential of an instrument which could bring together the traditional strummed style of Flamenco (‘rasgueado’) and the plucked style (‘punteado’), derived from lute technique, which could handle the rhythmic and melodic complexities of classical art music.
• One of the first, and certainly the most famous, composer to achieve this synthesis and create acclaimed concertos for the guitar was Joaquín Rodrigo. Blind from the age of three — the result of a diphtheria epidemic — he wrote in Braille and then dictated his music to a copyist (for most of his composing career, his wife, the pianist Victoria Kamhi) to have it transferred it into regular notation for publication.
• The Concierto de Aranjuez was inspired by the imposing architecture of the Aranjuez palace in central Spain, and the music which would have been played there in the 18th century: the last movement in particular recalls a spirited courtly dance. The flamenco influence can also be clearly heard, especially in the driving rhythms of the first movement. The middle movement features a slow and eloquent dialogue between guitar and cor anglais (a relative of the oboe).
• The Fantasía para un gentilhombre (Fantasia for a gentleman) was written 15 years after Aranjuez, and hearks back to an earlier age. The gentleman of the title is the 17th-century guitarist and composer Gaspar Sanz, who wrote an extensive manual on the guitar as well as popular dance tunes for the instrument. Rodrigo’s tribute to Sanz features a number of these dances, concluding with a ‘Canario’, a fast and energetic dance which came to Spain originally from the Canary Islands.
• The Concierto madrigal reaches back even further in time for its inspiration, to the music of the 16th century. Ironically (or perhaps tragically) for a blind man, the ‘madrigal’ referred to in the title begins ‘O my eyes, how happy you are…’. The tune of the madrigal weaves through the ten movements, played by different instruments in the orchestra and by the guitars themselves, but from this springboard the piece also delves into an array of sound worlds, from opera to flamenco, to create a dazzling array of textures and sounds.