© Photo: Marco Zanirato |
Platero y yo - Author's notes This work by the Spanish poet and Noble Laureate for literature Juan Ramón Jiménez, is dedicated to the story of a friendship between Platero (a donkey) and the poet.It is a prose-poem which evokes a rustic world, between fantasy and reality, against the backdrop of Andalucia and its landscape. The poet refers to the donkey's life and feelings in order to learn and reflect about nature and the world of men. In brief scenes, he narrates Platero's existence who, together with the poet, travels along the roads of Moguer – where Jimenez spent his youth – helping him during the journey to rediscover a sentiment for life. Between illusions and certainties, the donkey guides the poet through these places of his youth, where mystery is recomposed and the poetry of time is able to give new life to the intense sentiment which flows in humble and beautiful things. Making poetry becomes here a search for wisdom, a wisdom which finds its center in the acceptance of life by recognizing pain and death as a part of itself . Born in Florence in 1895, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco soon became one of the most widely performed composers of his generation. Among the many greats who loved and played his music let us remember Toscanini, Heifetz, Piatigorski, Gieseking and Segovia. After the passing of the 1938 Racial Laws in Italy, he managed, with Toscanini's and Heifetz's support, to take refuge in the USA with his family. He remained there till his death in 1968. Thanks to his belief in the expressive potencial of the guitar and to his collaboration with Andrés Segovia, Castelnuovo-Tedesco dedicated to this instrument numerous compositions. Although, as a composer, he was quite traditional in his style of writing, he was among the first 20th century musicians to compose a Concerto for guitar and orchestra. Furthermore, he experimented with audacious instrumental matches, proposing unusual combinations for the guitar as is the case in Romancero Gitano for chorus and guitar, and in this Platero y yo, for narrator and guitar. Platero y yo – the delicate fresco which consists of 128 prose-poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez – is a sequence of 'narrative scenes' in which the great Spanish poet imagines he is speaking with his donkey. From these 'scenes', Castelnuovo-Tedesco carefully chose twenty-eight, revealing a brilliant talent for merging very well-written music into the weave of Jimenez' masterpiece. The dialogue between the narrator and the music flows intensely, the music is not a simple commentary but, on the contrary, collaborates fully with the text in order to create a single poetic dicourse. During this concert, Moni Ovadia and I present thirteen lyrics, those we considered to be most representative of the whole work. They respond, both in musical and poetical terms, to our own personal taste. The selection also includes a lyric which Castelnuovo-Tedesco did not set to music (with which Moni Ovadia opens the evening) but which we found to be particularly significant. The evening ends, upon the death of Platero, with the performance of Maurice Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte, in Castelnuovo-Tedesco's transcription for solo guitar: this transcription remained unpublished for many years and was given to me in 1995, on the centennial of the composer's birth, by one of his children. Emanuele Segre |
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