Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)

No. 330 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast330

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Joaquín Rodrigo discovered a way of bringing Spanish music into the 20th century. His solution was to exploit singable melody and to use traditional orchestral timbres; or as the musicologist Tomas Marco puts it: "In form, harmony, melody and rhythm, Rodrigo's work might be broadly classified as neo-classical".

Rodrigo fell victim to a diphtheria epidemic when he was just three years old, which left him almost totally blind (his sight was completely gone by 1948). The disability was the determining factor in Rodrigo's devotion to music, and, for the practicalities of composing, his companion Rafael Ibanez took musical dictations and made copies of his work.

Rodrigo wrote a good deal of guitar music -- not surprising for a Spanish composer of the twentieth century, but what was somewhat surprising was that he did not play the guitar. His guitar pieces are not particularly idiomatic: they use sounds from Spanish vernacular traditions, but guitarists say they don't fit easily under the fingers and in fact are unusually difficult to play.
 Our montage features a few selections for solo guitar. In Madrid in 1939, Rodrigo's first important composition emerged: the Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra, the success of which cast a shadow over much of his subsequent work.

To complete the montage, the Concierto serenata for harp and orchestra was written for Nicanor Zabaleta, who premiered the work in Madrid on November 9, 1956; Paul Kletzki conducted the Spanish National Orchestra. The concerto is in three movements; the first of the three movements represents a group of young musicians walking in the street; the third represents evening. The second is written in form of a canon.

I think you will love this music too.