Four stars: Charming, nostalgic tone-painting of Spain by an Italian composer, brilliantly played by a Danish guitarist.
CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO Platero y Yo  Niklas Johansen (gtr)  OUR RECORDINGS 8.226930-31 (109:10 ) Reviewed from a WAV download: https://www.ourrecordings.com/albums/platero-y-yo
In 1932 Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) met world-renowned classical guitarist Andrés Segovia at a music festival in Venice. They remained close until the composer’s death, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote a lot of guitar music, much of it with Segovia in mind, including a 1954 Tonadilla on Segovia’s name. In 1960 Castelnuovo-Tedesco embarked on his most ambitious guitar project to date, based on a 1916 collection of prose poems by Spanish writer Juan Ramón Jiménez called Platero y Yo (Platero and I), about a young man traveling through the countryside around Moguer, Andalucia with his pet donkey, Platero.
When he wrote Platero y Yo in 1914, two years before the work was published, Jiménez was in a hospital recovering from a mental breakdown and clinical depression. He was also dealing with the professional setback of the failure of the avant-garde literary magazine, Prometeo, in 1912. Jiménez had contributed several pieces to this magazine, including fictional stories about him seducing novice nuns who were working as nurses in the local hospital. In 1916 he married Zenobia Camprudi while they were on vacation in the U.S., and he got Platero published at first in a heavily edited form as a book for children, then at full length as an adult work in 1917.
In 1960 Castelnuovo-Tedesco took hold of Jiménez’s book and used it as the basis for what Diana Castelnuovo-Tedesco, granddaughter of the composer and owner and manager of his official website, called a “melologue,” a work for narrator and guitar. The narrator would read each of the 28 chapters (of Jiménez’s 138 total) Castelnuovo-Tedesco had selected for the work, and then the guitarist would play the corresponding movement. When he got the score, Segovia asked Castelnuovo-Tedesco for permission to perform it without the narration, and the composer gave his O.K. Later Segovia recorded an abridged version consisting of just 10 of the 28 movements.
Since then various guitarists have recorded Platero, sometimes abridged, sometimes complete. Some recordings have used narration in the original Spanish, some have used English (Castelnuovo-Tedesco sanctioned an English translation by Elisa Roche, though the copy of Platero I worked from when I researched this review was a Dover Press edition with the Spanish text on one side and another English version, by Stanley Appelbaum, on the other), and one has used Japanese. Ironically, though Diana Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s website lists complete recordings in English and Japanese, the ones with Spanish narration are all abridged.
Like the preceding recording by Catherine Loillos, this new one by prize-winning Danish guitarist Niklas Johansen doesn’t use a narrator. Instead Lars Hannibal, co-founder of OUR Recordings and co-producer of this release (with Preben Iwan and Mette Due), hired a Danish artist named Halfdan Pisket to illustrate the chapters Castelnuovo-Tedesco set with simple cartoon-ish drawings. Pisket’s art is reproduced in the album booklet alongside the chapters of Jiménez’s book the composer used.
If Castelnuovo-Tedesco wanted the piece performed as a dramatic whole with narration and music combining to tell Jiménez’s tale, he did himself no favors with the way he laid out the piece. Not only did he pick just 28 of Jiménez’s 138 chapters, he drastically reshuffled their order. Only once in the work—with the 16th and 17th movements, “April Idyll” and “The Canary’s Flight”—does Castelnuovo-Tedesco set two adjacent chapters from Jiménez’s text in chronological order. Particularly aggravating are the two instances in which he suddenly cuts from chapters in which Platero is dead or dying (movements seven, “Melancholy,” and 21, “Death”) to earlier chapters in which Platero is still alive (“Friendship” and “Convalescence,” the latter of which refers to the human protagonist, not Platero).
Though I wish OUR Recordings would have included the narration in both Spanish and English, tracking it separately so you could hear the piece either in Spanish, in English, or with no narration at all, Platero y Yo is a marvelous sequence of vignettes (as is Jiménez’s novel as well). Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s masterly use of the acoustic guitar to paint vivid sonic pictures of nature makes this piece come alive. Though Lars Hannibal is a professional guitarist himself, he chose not to make the recording but to look for another guitarist to realize this music.
Hannibal found him in young Danish guitarist Niklas Johansen when he heard Johansen perform Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. “I knew I had found the right artist,” Hannibal said “Niklas, who has won eight international guitar competitions, had just been named [Danish classical radio station] DR P2’s Young Artist of the Year. I handed him the score to Platero y Yo, and he immediately connected with the music. Since then, he has spent countless hours studying and internalizing the work, which he now performs in its entirety, by heart, in concert.”
Johansen’s command of this music is self-evident throughout this recording. So is the perfection of his technique. Hannibal also secured excellent sound for the record by going to what he called “the finest acoustic for guitar I have tried in my 50 years as a touring guitarist: Fredensborg Palace Chapel, a setting whose warmth perfectly suits this Spanish music. A special permit from His Majesty King Frederik X was required, and we are deeply grateful to have received it.” Hannibal claims that at 109 minutes, Platero y Yo is the longest piece ever written for classical guitar, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome (unlike Kaikhosru Sorabji’s even longer marathons for solo piano). And at times Johansen’s guitar sound is so full it almost seems like he's doubling on harp.
Platero y Yo is a unique work, surprisingly evocative of Spain even though its composer was an Italian native who wrote it in the U.S. Though it’s existed at least on the fringes of the standard classical repertoire since it was written, this new version should make Platero the donkey (the word means “silversmith” in Spanish and Jiménez used it to refer to Platero’s unusually smooth silver coat) and his companion “yo” lots of new friends in the classical music listening world. Staunchly and nostalgically recommended. Mark Gabrish Conlan