Music Director
Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999):
Concierto de Aranjuez
Joaquin Rodrigo was born in 1901 in Sagunto, in the province of Valencia on Spain's Mediterranean coast. The youngest in a family of ten children, he got sick during the diphtheria epidemic of 1905 and lost his eyesight. The family moved to Valencia where Joaquin attended a school for the blind. Joaquin was taken to the Apollo Theater often, and was fascinated by the music accompanying the performances. He learned piano and violin using Braille and studied harmony and composition with Francisco Antich of the Valencia Conservatory.
In the 1920s Rodrigo went to Paris to study composition with Paul Dukas. He would eventually meet Manuel de Falla, a Spanish composer who was to become a lifelong mentor and friend. When de Falla received the French Legion d'Honneur, he included music by Rodrigo in the concert following the ceremony. In 1933, Rodrigo met Turkish pianist Victoria Kamhi, whom he married.
By the end of his life, Rodrigo had composed more than 150 works, many incorporating the folk tunes and dance rhythms of Spain. It is interesting that Aaron Copland and many other American composers flocked to Paris in the 1920s. Rodrigo did for the music of Spain what Aaron Copland was to do for American music. Rodrigo's most famous piece is the Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra, composed in Paris in 1939. One of the first guitar concertos ever written, the work was meant to honor the palace and royal gardens at Aranjuez, a town near Madrid.. When asked about the three-movement work, the composer stated:
Although this concerto is a piece of pure music, without any program, by situating it in Aranjuez, I wanted to indicate a specific time: the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the courts of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, a subtly stylized atmosphere of majas, bullfighters, and Spanish sounds returned from America...
The composer included his own program notes for the 1940 premiere in Barcelona, He wrote:
It would be pointless to look for strength in this Concerto...or grand sonorities; this would be to falsify its conception and minimize an instrument made for subtle suggestiveness. Its strength can be found in lightness and intensity of contrasts. The sounds of the Concierto de Aranjuez are hidden within the breeze which rustles the foliage of its parks; it would wish to be light and agile only like a butterfly and girl about only like a veronica (a pass of the cape in bull-fighting.
While he was composing the concerto, Rodrigo's wife's life was endangered by the birth of a stillborn child. The somber adagio movement may have been an expression of the composer's prayers for his wife's recovery.
The Concierto de Aranjuez was very successful and became a favored addition to the international concert repertoire after World War II. Many recordings have been made, including Gil Evans's arrangement of the adagio for trumpeter Miles Davis and a jazz band.
After the Spanish Civil War, Rodrigo returned to Spain, becoming a music critic and a musical advisor for Spain's National Radio. He held the Manuel de Falla Chair at the University of Madrid for thirty years. He composed his Fantasia Para una Gentilhombre for guitarist Andre Segovia in 1954. In 1991, King Juan Carlos I of Spain gave Rodrigo the royal title of Marquis of the Aranjuez Gardens.
Program notes by Beth Bergman Fisher