Concierto de Aranjuez
Joaquín Rodrigo Vidre (1901-1999)
THE STORY
Composed at the suggestion of guitarist Regino Saínz de la Maza, Concierto de Aranjuez takes its title from the royal seat of the Bourbon kings south of Madrid. Although the Concierto is abstract music, the title evokes the luxurious palace and gardens in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, graced with French architecture and marble statuary.
Beneath the delights of the famed concerto the listener may sense the immense resilience that marked the composer’s life. Having lost partial sight at the age of three from a diphtheria epidemic. Joaquín Rodrigo studied music from an early age at a school for the blind in his hometown of Valencia. He composed in Braille before dictating each note of each instrument to his copyists.
In his 20s, he moved to study at the Paris Conservatoire with Paul Dukas, as had other prominent Spanish composers before him including Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz. When the Spanish Civil War ended, in 1939, Rodrigo and his wife returned to Spain carrying all their worldly possessions in two suitcases. One suitcase held the composition which has become perhaps the most famous work for guitar and orchestra—though the composer himself never mastered the instrument.
LISTEN FOR
- The virtuosic flamenco influences of the first movement, with playing styles in the strummed chords that Rodrigo proudly described as being “the soul of Spanish music”
- The elegiac six-bar cantabile melody of the famed Adagio, reiterated with inflections in the guitar in a memorable dialogue
- A courtly dance of in the final movement featuring unaccompanied and increasingly dexterous guitar passages which conclude in a light and subdued ending
INSTRUMENTATION
Solo guitar; piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, strings
