The Guitar… From Spanish Courts to Global Stages.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you. And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… The Guitar.

And as this is the first adventure with the guitar on ‘Classical For Everyone’ I’m going to feature quite a bit of music from Spain.. probably the country that was most closely identified with the instrument until companies in America popularised the electric guitar. But as well as Spain there will be music from Austria-Hungary, Italy and Brazil with works by Albeniz, Mudarra, Haydn, Granados, Rodrigo, Scarlatti, Villa-Lobos and Falla.

In 1892 the composer Isaac Albeniz wrote a six minute piece of music for solo piano where he imitated the flamenco guitar sounds of southern Spain. After his death in 1909 his German publisher gave the piece the name of ‘Asturias’ which is in fact an area in northern Spain. And then in subsequent years it was transcribed for guitar… sort of coming full circle. And today it is best known in this version. And here is the transcription by Andres Segovia published in 1956 performed by the guitarist John Williams. ‘Asturias’ by Isaac Albeniz.

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That was ‘Asturias’ by Isaac Albeniz in the transcription by Andres Segovia performed by John Williams... not the famous Hollywood screen composer… but the Australian born and London based classical guitar virtuoso… who will play another piece for us later.

Next up I have a quite beautiful piece of music from almost five hundred years ago. But first a little background… The pre-history of the guitar, of the instruments it evolved from, is a much contested and wonderfully complicated subject but there is a certain amount of agreement that what we think of today as the acoustic guitar emerged in medieval Spain where the Arab oud and the European lute met in the Moorish kingdom of Al-Andalus. And some time later the guitar’s parent, if I can call it that, appeared… an instrument called the vihuela. And in 1546 in Seville a priest by the name of Alonso Mudarra published a collection of his compositions for the vihuela. From that I am going to play you his Fantasia X. But because there are not a lot of vihuela CDs in the collection I am going to play you a transcription for modern guitar by Narciso Yepes… who is also the performer. Fantasia X by Alonso Mudarra. It is about 5 minutes long.

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That was Fantasia X by Alonso Mudarra transcribed for guitar and performed by Narciso Yepes. I hope you are enjoying this episode of Classical For Everyone featuring music for the guitar.

In the late 1700s in Spain and Italy the guitar was making its way into small classical music ensembles… most effectively by being added to the string quartet… the combination of two violins, a viola and a cello. And the works were called guitar quintets. Elsewhere in Europe the same was happening with Lutes. In the late 1750s Josef Haydn wrote his eighth String Quartet and then sometime later either he or another composer transcribed it into a version for lute and string quartet. And in recent years guitarists wanting to increase the amount of available music for their instrument have been adapting it for Guitar and Strings. And I am going to play you a section of one of these. Here is guitarist Karin Schaupp and the Flinders Quartet with the final section of what has become known as Josef Haydn’s Quartet guitar, violin, viola and cello Arranged from his String Quartet No. 8.

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That was guitarist Karin Schaupp and the Flinders Quartet with the final section of Josef Haydn’s Quartet for guitar, violin, viola and cello. Ok, back to Spain. In 1912 the composer Enrique Granados published a group of songs for voice and piano he called ‘Tunes in the Old Style’. At some point after that the guitarist composer Miguel Llobet took one of them and transcribed it for guitar. It is called ‘La Maja de Goya’… or very loosely in English ‘Goya’s Madrid Beauty’… referring to a stylish working-class woman who appears in two paintings by Francisco Goya that now hang in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Here is ‘La Maja de Goya’ by Enrique Granados performed by John Williams.

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That was ‘La Maja de Goya’ by Enrique Granados transcribed for the guitar by Miguel Llobet and it was performed by John Williams. So far in this all guitar episode of the Classical For Everyone podcast it has mainly been solo guitar music with only the Josef Haydn having some additional instruments. It is time to add an orchestra.

The Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo was blind from the age of three and was not actually a guitarist. But his ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ is one of the best known works for guitar and orchestra… and I think one of the most beautiful compositions of the 20^th century. Not that I want to play favourites. The title comes from the Royal Palace in the town of Aranjuez about an hour south of Madrid and in the early 1930s when it was open to the public, Rodrigo and his wife would make day trips by train and particularly enjoy the palace gardens which for a blind man would perhaps have been a soothing contrast to the noises of the crowded poor section of the capital they were living in. When he came to write his guitar concerto in 1939 (by the way, using Braille to do so) he recalled the visits to the palace garden and used the name of the town for the title.  I’m only going to play you the middle section of the concerto. But after I’ve played it I’ll mention an easy way to hear the rest of it… the whole thing is magnificent. But for now here are the guitarist Göran Söllscher and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with the slow section of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo.

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That was the guitarist Göran Söllscher and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with the slow section of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo. I said I was going to tell you an easy way to hear the rest of that work. Just head to the classicalforevryone.net and go to the page for this episode and there you will find a link to a Spotify playlist where you can hear the full versions of most of the music I’m playing you in this episode.

Ok. The composer Domenico Scarlatti was born in 1685 and is best known as the composer of over 500 pieces for solo keyboard… in his day usually a harpsichord or one of its relatives. Though he was born in Naples he spent the second half of his life in Spain and musicologists argue that the guitar was a significant influence on a number of the keyboard works he wrote. At the same time there is also a technical connection between harpsichords and guitars as in each instance sound is made by strings being plucked. And it is not much of a leap to contemporary guitarists looking to Scarlatti’s sonatas, as they have come to be known, for music to be performed on the guitar. Narciso Yepes transcribed a healthy collection of the sonatas. And here he is playing   the one with the catalogue number K.77. One thing that struck me about this work when I was putting the episode together is that it feels quite modern for music written about three hundred years ago. It seems quite fresh. I hope you agree. Here it is Narciso Yepes playing his transcription of Scarlatti’s Sonata K.77. It is about eight minutes long.

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That was Narciso Yepes playing his transcription of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata K.77

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have a couple more pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you 60 seconds of information that I hope you find useful…If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than a dozen, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. There you will also find some mini-episodes that address some of what I want to call the vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is almost everything in Italian?’. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes. I hope you have enjoyed this Guitar-focused episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish this episode I have a section from another guitar concerto. This one is by the Brazilian composer Heitor (Aytor) Villa-Lobos. It was commissioned by guitarist Andrés Segovia in 1951. But for a bunch of reasons it was not premiered until 1956. And I’m not sure why it strikes me as I don’t know ‘incongruous’ but the premiere was in Houston, Texas. But the occasion was by at least one account… a night to remember… Hubert Roussel was the music critic for the Houston Post from 1933–1966. Here is an excerpt of his review of the concert…

“Here, then, before an audience of 3,040 souls, was presented, in one sense, as impressive and significant a musical scene as the world of 1956 can afford. One saw two living masters of the art, Villa-Lobos, the Brazilian, is 68; Segovia, the Spaniard, 63. One of these men has made his bid for a place of importance in the history of creative music. The other has brought the art of performing on the classical guitar to a point beyond which nothing is left to achieve.”

And he described the concerto itself in pretty glowing terms…

“The new composition is a delicate and shimmering thing. Like all of the chamber music of Villa-Lobos that I have been able to hear, it is beautiful, exquisite in its graces of theme, treatment and coloration, intensely lyric, rhythmically inventive, and in general a joy to the ear.”

Critics are sometimes justifiably seen as the enemies of the arts they profess to revere but it has to be argued that we ought to be a bit more grateful for their chronicles of the times. Ok. The music. Here is the second section of the Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra by Heitor (Aytor) Villa-Lobos. It is about eight minutes long and this performance is by the guitarist Pepe Romero and Neville Marriner conducts the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. It finishes with a remarkable three and a half minutes of solo guitar composition and performance.

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That was the second section of the Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra by Heitor (Aytor) Villa-Lobos. The guitarist was Pepe Romero and Neville Marriner conducted the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’. And if you’ll indulge me for a moment I want to dedicate this episode to my niece Emma and her fiancé Alberto. Felicidades por tu compromiso

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never. And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you…  Here is the Spanish Dance No. 1 from Manuel de Falla’s opera ‘La vide breve’ or ‘The Short Life’ from 1913 transcribed for two guitars and performed by Turibio Santos and Oscar Caceres.

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