Classical byDermot Clinch
Miles Davis had a high opinion of Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. "If you tried to play bebop on it," said the trumpeter, "you'd wind up being a hip cornball." In his 1960 album Sketches of Spain Davis and his arranger, Gil Evans, make the slow movement swing. They Manhattanise it and blast it temporarily off stage with big-band trombones, but they keep the bebop at bay. The concerto opens the album: castanets click in Iberian salute (the single cornball banality on the disc) and Rodrigo's melancholy insinuates itself into our consciousness once again.
Davis and Evans were not the first jazzmen to notice how close New Orleans was to Spain. "If you can't put Spanish in your tunes," Jelly Roll Morton had said in the early days, "you'll never get the right seasoning for jazz." Davis's Rodrigo is fine - the affinity between moody jazz and moody Iberianism is demonstrated - but ultimately it can only be unfaithful by rolling Rodrigo's melody, divided in the original between the solidity of winds and the evanescent texture of guitar, into one singular, substantial voice.
Rodrigo, who died last week aged 97, hoped his concerto would be "a special success, enjoyed by the public, and played often". His wish was granted. The slow movement became known as "Mon Amour". The Modern Jazz Quartet did a version. The composer's wife put words to it, and so did Nana Mouskouri. Men on omnibuses sang it, and so did Placido Domingo. Rodrigo's concerto became, with the exceptions, perhaps, of Barber's Adagio and Ravel's Bolero, the best-known classical music of the century.
Does popularity disqualify it from serious consideration? A stupid question, but the idea that the only good music is difficult music dies hard, and the answer from some quarters is a beleaguered "yes". So what, though, if Rodrigo's concerto, with its memories of "earlier times, of the lovely gardens of Aranjuez with their fountains, their trees, their birds", is not the most progressive work since The Rite of Spring? Its invention, craftsmanship and integrity are qualities that Stravinsky, as well as any composer, might admire.
Rodrigo was unable to play the guitar but he was the century's greatest composer for the instrument. His guitar concerto was the first of 11 he wrote for various instruments, and much of that work, such as the Summer Concerto for violin, is music to love as perhaps we love Prokofiev or Barber or Copland, with just enough complexity, enough abrasion, to suggest inner richness.
Rodrigo is the greatest Spanish song composer ever in the opinion of some. Buy the recording of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Manuel Barrueca on EMI, one of 60 currently available, and you will also hear a handful of songs to poems by Lope de Vega sung, at his relaxed and seductive best, by Placido Domingo. At least one of them, the Christmas song "Pastorcito Santo", is unforgettably beautiful.
Grove's dictionary tells us that Rodrigo is considered by some an "obstacle" to progress in his own country, which apparently yearns to be rebarbatively modern. To the outside world, Rodrigo has provided what Spain has so often offered the outside world, a kind of emotional refreshment. Chopin went to Majorca and returned not happy but musically invigorated; Chabrier, Debussy and Ravel found, in the sensuous Iberian atmosphere, a permissive environment in which to let their hair down. And not even Manuel de Falla, Rodrigo's mentor and the greatest Spanish composer of the century, who came closest to modernism in his friendships with Picasso, Stravinsky and Massine, ever indulged his puritan spirit with a puritan, modernist musical rigour.
Music exists and passes away in time. Rodrigo achieved what few composers have dared for in the latter part of this century or thought valuable enough to aim for: a popular posterity in which their music might find a kind of permanence. Through its fame, the Concierto de Aranjuez is shored up against its own ruin.
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