Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 36-year collaboration with the legendary guitarist Andrés Segovia resulted in 35 works featuring the guitar, including three concertos several large cycles and numerous shorter pieces. Castelnuovo-Tedesco first met Segovia at a festival in Venice in 1932 and composed a new work for the legendary guitarist almost every year afterwards. Among the towering masterpieces in guitar literature is Castelnuovo- Tedesco’s Platero y Yo (Platero and I), a cycle of consisting of 28 settings, arranged into four groups of seven-movement suites with a total playing time of 1 hour and 49 minutes.

Originally conceived as an accompaniment for a recitation of selections from the Nobel Prize winning Catalan poet Juan Ramon Jiménez’s collection of poetic sketches of the same name, the composer gave his permission for the work to be performed without spoken text, which is how it is performed here. You can read Jiménez’s texts in English translation while listening to the music and enjoying the wonderful illustrations for each movement by the award-winning artist Halfdan Pisket especially commissioned for this recording.