Rodrigo guitar concerto in concert

[LarryC]

The National Phiharmonic will perform Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra at Strathmore in Bethesda on February 28. This is the slow (second) movement on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1WgoSfV_Kg&feature=related. I will be going with friends.

From Wikipedia:

Joaquín Rodrigo Vidre (22 November 1901 – 6 July 1999) was a composer of classical music and a virtuoso pianist. Despite being blind from an early age, he achieved great success. Rodrigo is considered to be among the greatest composers of the 20th century, and his Concierto de Aranjuez is one of the pinnacles of the Spanish music and guitar concerto repertoire.

He was born in Sagunto, Valencia, and lost his sight almost completely at the age of three after contracting diphtheria. He began to study solfège, piano and violin at the age of eight; harmony and composition from the age of sixteen. Although distinguished by having raised the Spanish guitar to dignity as a universal concert instrument and best known for his guitar music, he never mastered the instrument himself. He wrote his compositions in braille, which was transcribed for publication.

[TheEvan]

Who will be the soloist?

(Lifelong classical guitarist here. I envy your proximity to the Peabody and the vibrant classical guitar community there)

Rodrigo's lack of guitar facility actually opened up compositional possibilities a guitarist may not have explored. He composed pure music with the guitar in mind, but remaining unaware of its imitations. He left it up to the guitarist to figure out how to play it...if it could be played. Hence, a good deal of his music is uniqely virtuosic.

[TheEvan]

For example, the wonderful Canadian Jerome Ducharme on Rodrigo's Fandango

Perhaps more virtuosic yet is the Zapatedeo

[LarryC]

Rodrigo's orchestration in this work is terrific! Like several Spanish composers, he was trained in France, under Dukas (Sorcerer's Apprentice), where there is a long tradition of exceptional woodwind use and clarity. You're right about performers after the Classical era not being the greatest composers, e.g., Pagannini. Beethoven and Mozart did all right, though.

The performances I have on CD follow the notes in the score exactly, but the part doesn't look very complicated.

Manuel Barrueco is the soloist. http://www.strathmore.org/eventstickets/calendar/view.asp?id=3574

[Marvel]

I have seen both Manuel Barrueco and Christopher Parkening perform with our local symphony. Barrueco was by far the more enjoyable. He looked like he was enjoying himself, having a good time, while Parkening looked pained and hard at work.

Barrueco used a mic. and small speaker system right in front of him. Not sure what microphone he used, perhaps a tiny ribbon, the speaker looked like a Mackie HR824. You couldn't tell other than you could always hear him extraordinarily well. With the single speaker in front of him, it was a nice point source. I don't even remember what the music was... []

I love the Rodrigo! The only recording I have is of... Parkening. Wish I could be there to hear the concert.

Bruce

[TheEvan]

Barrueco is simply the best of the best. He's not recorded Aranjuez. Actually the Naxos reading With Norbert Kraft is nice with a very natural sound. Williams' early version with Eugene Ormandy is a great performance all around. Nice warm sound if a bit opaque.

[jheis]

Although I've never heard the "real thing," I've always liked the jazz version by Jim Hall as well as the Miles Davis/Gil Evans colaboration on Sketches of Spain.

Looking over the Sketches of Spain liner notes, however, surprisingly I see that there wasn't even a guitarist on the session!

Understand that there is also a version by Paco de Lucia - although I've never heard it.

James

[skonopa]

The National Phiharmonic will perform Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra at Strathmore in Bethesda on February 28. This is the slow (second) movement on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1WgoSfV_Kg&feature=related. I will be going with friends.

To dig up an old thread....

I've attended this with Larry C and some of his other guests last night.

What an absolutly beautiful performance this was! They did use some amplification for the guitar itself, but just enought to make it more pronounced so it will stand out better from the orchestra, but not so much that it overpowers the rest of the performance. They did this since the acoustic guitar, unamplified, is such a subtle instrument and would be difficult to folks to hear it, especially those more towards the back (Larry and I was in Row J of the orchestra section - only ten rows back from the stage, thus we got a good view of the performance).

The guitarist, Manuel Barrueco, put on a stunning, very emotional performance, and worked in so seamlessly with the rest of the orchestra. As for the orchestra itself, this was a fairly small chamber orchestra, with some 40-odd peices. I was also very impressed with the orchestration presented in this concerto. Seems Rodrigo addes some very neat little touches and details to it, such as during one passage in (If I remember, the second movement), there was some very subtle pizzacoto from the violins behind the guitar solo, that I thought was really cool.

The night started out with Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No 1. in D Major, Op. 25 ("Classical"). This was a nifty little piece, which started out the evening quite nicely. There is was some neat interplay with some of the instruments throughout, most notably in the first and last movements.

Then came Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, Op 43 as described above, followed by an intermission.

After the intermission came Maurice Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oie (Mother Gooes Suite). I've never heard this in its entiretly, as neither has Larry, so he found this to be a pretty neat treat as well. I was impressed with some of the instrumentation that this consisted of, using everything from a Harp, to bells, to even a Contra-bassoon. And this is in all a small chamber orchestra (not a full-blown 80+ piece symphony orchestra). I personally liked the "Cinquieme tableau" or fifth movement myself, which has a very cool Asian/Chinese feel to it, using all kinds of interestring instrumentation throughout, including gong crashes.

All of these performances was conducted by Piotr Gajewski, which I thought he did an excellent job of keeping the pace and tempo to a very listenable level, and not make it feel "rushed" or "drawn out".

Overall, I found this to be a really good performance last night and was a treat to get to spent a little time with Larry C to take in a performance such as this. Really looking forward to the April gathering when we see Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony.

Also to add - one thing I noticed was the number of children I've seen last night at this performance! Apparently, according to this one tiny blurb I've seen in the program material, there was "all kids, all free" for this performance. Still pretty neat to see children be able to come to a performance like this and seem to enjoy it.

[TheEvan]

Thanks for the report! I'll never tire of Barrueco.

Not for nothing Ravel is honored as a master of orchestration, perhaps most famously for a piece he didn't compose, Mussorgsky's iconic Pictures at an Exhibition.

[TheEvan]

PS: Barrueco's recent recording, Concierto Barrocco, is a sonic knockout and very interesting program, especially an amazing arrangement of Paart's Fratres.

[LarryC]

I honestly can't add anything to Steve's great and perceptive review! However, we sat on the main floor, and I DID miss not sitting in the balcony directly over the right side of the stage, because all 3 of these works have a lot of woodwind, brass and lots of percussion detail that I much prefer seeing right in front of me as they play.

The Mother Goose Suite probably deserves its obscurity. While its orchestration is amazingly inventive, very little of the music stays in the memory.

The Rodrigo was the highlight. The slow movement is a masterpiece of subtlety and ultra-detailed woven guitar playing, all of it written down, not improvised, by a composer who never learned to master playing the guitar!!

The National Philharmonic is a good little orchestra, even though it's "regional" and not an artistic giant like the National or the Baltimore orchestras. Gajewski really should be better known. He should get a stage surname that people can pronounce and remember.

This is a Youtube clip of another famous guitarist John Williams and the Berlin Philharmonic playing the great slow movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1WgoSfV_Kg&feature=PlayList&p=C59C5D7BBCCBFFAC&playnext=1&index=18. Note the famous opening English horn solo.

Thanks for the write-up, Steve!