Giuliani/Rodrigo: Guitar Concertos

Hybrid/SACD DSD remastered Playable on all compactdisc players

"..it is a surprise and delight to welcome PentaTone's four-channel remastering of the material at hand, recorded in quad in 1974. The rear channels are ambience only; from the front comes a natural balance between soloist(s) and orchestra…"
---James Reel, Fanfare

" This SA-CD is a particular pleasure to hear, offering Giuliani's delightful first guitar concerto with Pepe Romereo as soloist, as well as Rodrigo's Cocierto Madrigal in which he is joined by his brother Angel…As a bonus we have the same composer's Sones en la Giralda scored for harp and orchestra, with Catherine Michel as soloist. Although the recordings on this SA-CD were made in two locations, the surround sound and overall effect is the same, that is to say totally satisfactory."
---Robert Benson, classicalcdreview.com

"The Romeros also recorded these works for Mercury Records, but not in surround sound, and their orchestral backing with Sir Marriner couldn't be better. One won't notice the absence of the center channel or sub output - these are superb surround recordings that don't sound dated in any way."
--John Sunier, audiophine audition

"The sound quality is as good as I have come to expect from the Pentatone RQR releases, and is a slight improvement over the original Philips LP in terms of its transparency and spatiality...Highly recommended."
--SA-CD.net

Already during their lifetime, the Italian Mauro Giuliani and the Spaniard Joaquín Rodrigo were considered outstanding icons of guitar music. Quite rightly, as Giuliani composed the first-ever concerto for six-string guitar in 1808, whereas the Concierto de Aranjuez, dating from 1940, is the most popular guitar concerto of the 20th century, and made its composer, Rodrigo, world famous.
Mauro Giuliani was born in the Italian province of Bari in 1781. After studying counterpoint and cello, he dedicated himself (probably in Naples) to mastering the six-string guitar, which had been invented in 1800. Giuliani holds a special position among the earliest composers who devoted themselves with great zest to the "new" instrument. He left Italy and went to Vienna in 1806 - then the uncontested musical capital of Europe.

He was remarkably successful here both as a virtuoso instrumentalist and as a composer. Vienna loved the "napoletano", as Giuliani described himself. He was one of the first composers to separate the accompanying voices from the melody with the aid of a new system of notation, by adding note stems and rests. On April 3, 1808 he finally achieved success, praised by critics and public alike, with his Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra No. 1 in A, Op. 30. In 1806/07 already, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung wrote that he played "the guitar with a rare gracefulness, skill and power". Giuliani also introduced the guitar to Vienna: numerous publications then followed not just of his own works, but also of works by other composers. Giuliani remained in Vienna until 1819, and was appointed "virtuoso onorario di camera" to the Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon's second wife. He gave concerts with great musicians of his day, such as Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. In 1829, Giuliani passed away in Naples, highly admired by all.
Apart from the Concerto in A recorded here, Giuliani composed two other concertos (Op. 36 and Op. 70), as well as numerous chamber-music and solo works for the guitar. The Concerto in A has three movements, like a Classical concerto. The first movement is in sonata form and has a lyrical style, oriented towards the example of Italian opera. Following the presentation of the themes in the exposition, the string orchestra fulfils an exclusively accompanying role in an exceedingly virtuoso solo-guitar movement. The second movement is an Andante siciliano in a lightly melancholy minor tone, with a middle part written in the major key and an unexpected deviation to the major key at the end. The work ends in a flourishing and triumphant manner with a Polonaise. Giuliani demands great virtuosity of the soloist and, above all, a complex sense of rhythm.

Joaquín Rodrigo was born in Valencia in 1901 and lost his sight when he was only three years old. After his early musical training, he went to Paris in 1927, where he studied piano, harmony, composition and the history of music. In 1939, Rodrigo finally settled in Madrid, where he wrote his most significant composition in 1940, the Concierto de Aranjuez, which brought him immediate fame. However, the crux of this global success was that his further works - ranging widely from songs to suites to operas and zarzuelas - hardly reached the public at large. Until his death in 1999, Rodrigo continued to be known as the composer of the Concierto de Aranjuez.
His Concierto Madrigal for two guitars and orchestra dating from 1965-68 is based on Jacques Arcadelt's madrigal „O ihr, meine glücklichen Augen". The composition, which has the structure of a suite, with 10 movements, combines in a very adroit manner dances from the Renaissance with Spanish and Afro-American Folklore.

Sones en la Giralda, which dates from 1963, is the title of one of the two concertante works composed by Rodrigo for the harp. Here, it is played in the original version.