Joaquín Rodrigo wrote a good deal of guitar music -- not surprising for a Spanish composer of the twentieth century, but what was somewhat surprising was that he did not play the guitar. His guitar pieces are not particularly idiomatic: they use sounds from Spanish vernacular traditions, but guitarists say they don't fit easily under the fingers and in fact are unusually difficult to play. The solo pieces played here (there are two duets) amplify that slightly edgier quality as compared with Rodrigo's standards for guitar and orchestra. They force the guitar to do interesting things. Sample the piece called "Bajando de la meseta" (Coming Down from the Mesa, track 9) from the Por los campos de España set, where the guitar evokes echoes bouncing off stone. It works, and it has the Spanish atmospherics Rodrigo is known for, but it's also quite unexpected. Lovers of the Fantasía para un gentilhombre and other Rodrigo standards will find that broadly appealing style represented here, for example in the final movement of the Sonata giocosa. But most of the music is either more specifically impressionistic or a bit more pointed. Por los campos de España is not a suite but a set of programmatic pieces written at different times, and they're unusually deep representations of individual Spanish places such as the Generalife -- the "garden of the architect" of Spain's Arab rulers. The opening Tres piezas españolas use dissonance in ways uncommon in Rodrigo's larger works. The twists and turns of Rodrigo's music are cleanly executed by guitarist
Jérémy Jouve, assisted in the Tonadilla for two guitars and a two-guitar arrangement of the piano Fandango del ventorrillo by Judicaël Perroy. The recording is very clean. A more-than-competent Rodrigo disc recommended to anyone enamored of the Rodrigo standards.