5 stars. The moment I began listening to this and grasping what it was about, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. This was it. I’d go even further to say that this would be my choice for record of the year award.

CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO Platero y yo  Niklas Johansen (gtr)  OUR 8226930-31 (2 CDs: 109:06 )

In a 48:1 review of Strauss’s Enoch Arden, I hazarded a guess that the musical genre of dramatic readings by a narrator to spoken text and set to an instrumental accompaniment of one sort or another, hasn’t found too many takers among classical composers, and that all such works I was able to call to mind off the top of my head, save for one, date from the 20th century: Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, and Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. There are probably others, but these were just the ones that popped into head.
The one outlier that dates back to 1886 that doesn’t actually qualify for the genre on a technicality is the ever-popular Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns. But he didn’t conceive the work with the rhyming verses by Ogden Nash that were added in 1949, 28 years after the composer’s death. It’s unlikely that Saint-Saëns ever contemplated such a thing being done to his Carnival, and whether he would have approved of it or not, we shall never know. The thing is, it’s almost as often performed in just its instrumental setting without Nash’s goofy commentaries, such as, “In the world of mules, there are no rules.”
And speaking of mules, that’s a perfect segue for what we have here in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Platero y yo (Platero and I), for Platero, you see, is the donkey in poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s novel-length poem. If I mused in 48:1 that spoken text set to music is a category of few works, that was before I met Platero. if there’s a scarcity of such works in the repertoire, C-T’s Platero y yo may just be the granddaddy of them all in terms of its ambition and scope.
So, let’s first get a handle on what this largescale melologue is. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (C-T hereinafter) composed an hour and 50 minutes’-worth of solo guitar music to accompany the narration of Jiménez’s prose poem about a poet and his donkey in Andalusia. From the poet’s 138-chapter work, C-T selected 28 of them to fashion into pieces for guitar that capture in music the essence of the stories that each of the selected chapters tells.
C-T further adapted his musical settings to fit both the original Spanish and English translations of the text. And like Saint-Saëns’s Carnival, Platero y yo is also often performed without narration, as it is here for solo guitar. Unlike the Saint-Saëns, however, the poet’s tableaux and C-T’s musical settings are not meant to be giggle-and-guffaw funny. To be sure, there are lighthearted, anecdotally amusing moments, but Jiménez’s lengthy poem is a deeply touching tale of a man’s love for his donkey and the animal’s reciprocal loyalty and love for his master. It’s a story of their adventures and exploits as they go through life and grow old together in a small Andalusian town, and it’s a story of heartbreak when, as is Nature’s wont, Platero dies.
Here is the opening verse in the final chapter: “Dear, trotting Platero, my beloved little donkey, who carried my soul so many times—only my soul, along the deep roadways of cacti and mallows and honeysuckle, for you this book that is of you, now that you can understand it.”
Anyone who has ever had to say goodbye to a beloved pet whose time has come can relate to this beautiful heartwarming and heartrending story. But Platero is more than a pet; he’s the poet’s soulmate and, in whatever way that sentient animals understand their masters and the world around them, I think one can say that the poet was soulmate to Platero.
Much to my surprise, this is not the first complete recording of C-T’s Platero y yo in its non-narrated, guitar-only performance. Dave Saemann reviewed guitarist Catherine Liolios’s performance in 41:2, and was apparently as moved by this most extraordinary composition as I am.
Dave’s descriptions of how C-T’s musical settings mesh with the poet’s prose is of an eloquence beyond my linguistic-expressive ability to match, so I ask that you please read his review to get a feeling for the beauty of the poetry and the music it inspired C-T to compose. What I would like to focus on here instead is the extraordinary work of art this new OUR album is, and of course, on the deeply moving, expressive, and inspirational playing of guitarist Niklas Johansen.
The two CDs are housed in a sturdy, handsome, hardcover book within an outer slipcase, made to the size of a standard double-disc album to nestle neatly on the shelf with the rest of your collection. Also contained within the outer slipcase is the 72-page booklet, printed on heavyweight, glossy paper and featuring essays about the work, photos of C-T, poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, C-T with Heifetz, and, of course, guitarist Niklas Johansen, more about whom follows below. The bulk of the booklet reproduces, in English only, Jiménez’s prose poems for each of the 28 chapters C-T chose to set to music.
But there’s yet a special treat in store. Each “left” page containing the text faces the “right” page for which illustrator Halfdan Pisket (b. 1985) has produced a hand-drawn cartoon that captures the essence of the words.
Prize-winning classical guitarist Niklas Johansen (b. 1989) is a Copenhagen native. He began playing the guitar at the age of nine, and in 2009, he entered the Royal Danish Academy of Music to study under Jesper Sivebæk. After completing his Bachelor’s degree there, he continued his studies in Alicante, Spain, earning his Master in Classical Guitar Performance degree under David Russell, Manuel Barrueco, and others. Niklas then spent a year studying with Ricardo Gallén at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar. Since 2022 he has been on the faculty as guitar instructor at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. His list of competition prizes and honors is a long one.
Johansen’s current OUR release does not appear to be his first recording. Amazon lists a CD of guitar works by Paganini and Piazzolla, but flags it as “currently unavailable.” This OUR recording of Platero y yo, however, which is also listed by Amazon, and available, does mark Niklas Johansen’s Fanfare debut, and an auspicious one it is indeed. The recording was made between February and April of this year (2025) in Denmark’s Fredensborg Palace Chapel.
The guitar-savvy reader will appreciate knowing that for the recording Johansen plays a double-top cedar guitar, built in 2013 by Granada maker Arnaldo Garcia. The instrument is strung with Knoblach Double Silver nylon strings (400 ADQ).
Even if these 28 guitar pieces by C-T were abstract studies with no extra-musical or programmatic ties to Juan Ramón Jiménez’s prose poems, they would have their own stories to tell—stories of joy and sorrow, of love and loss, and in the end, of life lived to its fullest. It’s really hard to describe the beauty of this music, for music begins where words end, and everything about this music—its performance by Johansen, the sound of his guitar, and the acoustic of the venue in which it was recorded—is transporting and transformational. Technically, Johansen’s playing is breathtaking, but more, it’s achingly beautiful.
I have to admit that until I received this release for review, I was having a hard time coming up with a final selection for my annual Want List. It’s not that there weren’t any number of candidates worthy of the honor, it’s just that I wanted to find something that was truly different and truly special. The moment I began listening to this and grasping what it was about, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. This was it. I’d go even further to say that this would be my choice for record of the year award. 5 stars Jerry Dubins