Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco website
By Diana Castelnuovo-Tedesco / News / 12 November 2025
PLATERO Y YO: JOHANSEN’S GUITAR TELLS THE STORY

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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco website
By Diana Castelnuovo-Tedesco / News / 12 November 2025
PLATERO Y YO: JOHANSEN’S GUITAR TELLS THE STORY

https://mariocastelnuovotedesco.com/platero-y-yo-niklas-johansen-recording/

In the summer of 1960, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco conceived Platero y yo as a melologue for narrator and solo guitar. After reading Juan Ramón Jiménez’s prose poems*, which recount the story of the deep bond between a poet and his donkey Platero, Castelnuovo-Tedesco selected twenty-eight vignettes to accompany with music. Although the composer wrote the music to accompany narration of the poems, he agreed that the music could also work on its own. While performers have presented the complete cycle with the spoken word in many languages, there is also a longstanding tradition—beginning with Andrés Segovia—of performing Platero y yo without narration, allowing the guitar itself to tell the story. The latest embodiment of this approach is a double album released by OUR Recordings, featuring Danish guitarist Niklas Johansen.
The recording presents the complete cycle—nearly two hours of music—and reflects Johansen’s close study of the poems, the Spanish language, and Andalusian culture, including time the guitarist spent near Jiménez’s hometown of Moguer, Spain. “After immersing myself in all twenty-eight pieces, I’ve experienced every corner of the emotional spectrum, as well as many timbres and expressions of the guitar, always colored by Tedesco’s distinctive character and tonal language,” Johansen explains. “It has been unique to experience how my approach to the work has been shaped by the music’s close relationship with Jiménez’s poetry: one can hear everything from the wind in the treetops in “La Arrulladora” to the shrill clatter of the birds in “La Primavera”. The poems have shaped my relationship with the music, and the music, in turn, has shaped my relationship with the poems.”
In a series of videos interviews available on YouTube, Johansen shares his reflections about the project: the challenge of storytelling exclusively via the music; how he interpreted each miniature while maintaining an overall vision of the cycle; his admiration for the expressive variety Castelnuovo-Tedesco achieves in his writing for the guitar; and the impact of the acoustics of Fredensborg Palace Chapel in Denmark, where the recording was made.
Thanks to His Majesty King Frederick X of Denmark, the album was recorded in this historic location, which was chosen for the extraordinary resonance of its interior. The atmosphere of the chapel offered a warmth that —as Johansen observes — “allow the chords to breathe beautifully,” while retaining acoustic clarity.
This impressive release is available on all major digital platforms and as a two-CD box set, which includes essays, the classic English translations of Jiménez’s poems, and illustrations for each movement by Danish artist Halfdan Pisket.
Discover what critics have said about this recording here.
For information about other recent recordings of this work, please check out: Platero Makes His Way Around The World.
*Mario recounts in his autobiography, Una vita di musica, that he first read the poems in an English translation by Elise Roach and later procured a copy in the original Spanish.