Argenta

Note: All work on this site is designed to expand "organically". In others work I'll get things done, I hope, just as soon as I have a moment and can get round to it.  

It was a wee while ago when my son had told me that he, his sister and their mother had once played a game that involved me. It is perhaps not an uncommon game in families in an idle moment. It was to imagine what music I would choose, were I to be invited onto Desert Island Discs. How far they got down the list of xxx choices I don't know. I must ask him sometime. But it seems they were unanimous in the choice of my number one.

In fact they were possibly wrong but not by much. There are two pieces that would fill the first two "slots", or rather "classical slots" for my sonic taste extends beyond, I would like to believe far beyond, the repertoire in its truest sense of Radio 3. But that is a matter for another place and time except to say that Troutmask Replica is a work of genius.

Perhaps it might seem curious that both the two top "classical slots" in question feature in part the same name. But there is a reason, a family one not through me but my children. It is not bad thing for a child growing up to perhaps have cell or two of a genius in the blood, albeit one that goes almost unrecognised today, especially in a sphere of Germanic hegemony with its lesser, Anglo-Saxon acolytes.    

Aranjuez

Introduction

There are many pieces of music of all genres, which are enhancing, emotionally, creatively, through inspiration. Fewer are those which inspire through enhancement although in pop-music the cover version that is better or through interpretation creates an alternative feeling is not unknown. However, in the classical realm, whilst one composer may pick up on a theme from another and expand upon it, very few pieces are "covered" and fewer still are kept notationally entire but still emerge literally transformed. One such is the Concierto de Aranjuez, the "Aranjuez", Rodrigo's Guitar Concerto and this is its story.

The Aranjuez was written mostly in Paris. It was finished in 1939. Its composer, the blind Spanish, indeed Valencian, Joaquin Rodrigo, was effectively in exile there. The Spanish Civil War was raging in all it viciousness and Valencia was Republican. Rodrigo was not. The war itself had seen the death of some Spanish artists. Lorca had been one. Others had fled from both sides of the divide. Amongst musicians the Catalan cellist, Pau Casals, had slipped across the border and was living just on the French side of it. Manuel de Falla, regarded as the country's foremost composer, was in self-imposed exile in Argentina. Andres Segovia, its pre-eminent guitarist, was in Uruguay. 

However, the 1st April 1939 had seen the conflict come to a political end, although conflict continued, some might same continues. The "Spanish State", as it was known was created under Francisco Franco, a general who had cut his teeth in Spain's North African colonies and set about transplanting those lessons onto the Spanish mainland. The regime was a military dictatorship, extreme right-wing, Fascist. And since Rodrigo was a political co-traveller, an "adherent", he was welcomed back into the reconstruction of its cultural elite, indeed, became an active participant with the Aranjuez one of his first gifts to it.   

Inspiration and Estreno