But fresh juxtapositions yield fresh perspectives. And so it proves here with...this „highly enjoyable new recording that provide attractive new settings for Rodrigo’s jewel.
Spanish composer Lorenzo Palomo’s suite for guitar and orchestra Nocturnos de Andalucía might use an orchestra more than twice the size of Rodrigo’s, but Palomo’s writing exhibits the same kind of elegant restraint. This magnificent tone-poem, with its lush, flamenco-hued evocations of shifting passions beneath the stars, thus balances rather than overwhelms Rodrigo’s chamber-like atmosphere – a genuine conversation, especially in the hands of the superb Swiss-born guitarist Christoph Denoth and the LSO under Jesús López Cobos.
Denoth’s own arrangement of Joaquín Malats’s tuneful, ever-popular Serenata española (actually originally an orchestral piece before being arranged for piano and then solo guitar) is closer to the Concierto de Aranjuez in its economy of means and elegant colouristic flourishes, and makes for a satisfying encore or pendant to the previous two works. Throughout, Denoth again shows himself to be a thoughtful musician of considerable taste and technical prowess, and his recording of the Palomo suffers not one jot by comparison with that of the work’s dedicatee, Pepé Romero.