The Arts Desk (UK)
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Platero y yo – an Andalusian Elegy Niklas Johansen (guitar) (OUR Recordings)
Born in Florence in 1885, Italian-Jewish musician Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco saw his early career as a prominent Italian contemporary composer interrupted by the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Mussolini’s Italian Racial Laws preventing performances of his music and barring him from teaching. Assistance from Toscanini and Heifetz helped him secure safe passage to New York, where he found work in Hollywood and taught privately. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s list of pupils contains a slew of famous names, including Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Nelson Riddle and André Previn (his personal favourite). His output was huge and varied but he’s best remembered today for his guitar music, most of it composed for his friend Andrés Segovia. Including the work on this exquisitely packaged double album, Platero y yo - a sequence of short solo guitar pieces intendended to accompany the recitation of extracts from a celebrated work by the great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. His Platero y yo consists of 138 prose poems describing scenes in the life of the young poet and his beloved donkey. There’s no narration here, the poems instead presented in the booklet with accompanying illustrations by Danish artist Halfdan Pisket.
Eloïse Roach’s English translations read well, Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s selection taking in Platero’s frisky youth, "tender and loving as a little boy", descriptions of the Andalusian landscape and a wide variety of human encounters. The pieces stand up as delicious miniatures on their own terms, but hearing them whilst reading the poetry adds another dimension. Sparrows, butterflies and canaries spring to life, Castelnuovo-Tedesco just as adept when conveying an abstract idea. Two early numbers evoking melancholy and friendship are affecting, and there’s a moving portrait of a consumptive young girl, Platero’s intervention provoking laughter “from her sharp, dead child’s face, all black eyes and white teeth.” Guitarist Niklas Johansen is a magnificent guide, his idiomatic, deft playing enough to convince me that Platero y yo is one of the great instrumental cycles and a 20th century masterpiece. Sample Johansen in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s description of Platero’s death, his percussive raps on the guitar’s body sounding like hammer blows, before a magical suggestion of sunlight shining through a stable window. Beautifully produced and magnificently recorded, this is a fabulous, life-enhancing release.
https://theartsdesk.com/classical-music/classical-cds-dirge-canons-dances-and-donkey