Platero & I is a captivating book of prose, the crowning achievement of Nobel Prize-winning writer Juan Ramón Jiménez. Subtitled "an Andalusian elegy," it is a reflection of the experiences of Jiménez and Platero, a little donkey to whom the poet confided his deepest thoughts, feelings, and observations about life in Spain at the
turn of the century.
Twenty-eight of the verses from Platero & I were set to music for classical guitar in 1960 by the Italian-born American composer, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Soon afterwards, Andrés Segovia recorded ten of them without narration, since much of the musical score sounds complete by itself. Both the music and the text, independent of one another, are profoundly expressive and moving; but together they become a true masterpiece.
Long considered a treasure in Spanish speaking countries, Platero & I is a timeless story that will continue to please audiences for generations to come as it finds its place among the classics. Now it may be heard for the first time in English together with the intricate and colorful music of Castelnuovo-Tedesco on this enchanting world-premiere CD recording performed by guitarist Frank Koonce and narrator Don Doyle.
"..refined and technically immaculate."
-Paul Fowles, Classical Guitar
"Koonce immediately assures the listener . . . that he is a player of refined and well developed tone and clean technique. . . . an ideal performance. . . . I admire the professionalism which has created the necessary sense of easiness about the performance."
-Chris Kilvington, Classical Guitar
"An outstanding program that has been a sheer delight to listen to . . . first-rate musicianship . . ."
-The Allegro Quarterly
"Most of the festival participants had heard Segovia's recordings of ten solo guitar excerpts from Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Platero y yo, Op. 190, but few had heard the work as it was intended - with a narrator reading the Nobel prize-winning poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez. Guitarist Frank Koonce and narrator Don Doyle, a professional actor and storyteller, presented a charming and moving performance in English of seventeen pieces (out of a total of 28) drawn from one of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's finest works - surely one of the highlights of the festival."
-Richard Long, Soundboard Magazine
"The performers....have put together a well thought out production, bringing their substantial talents together to great effect....they have lavished attention on every detail and nuance of the score. Koonce is especially effective in establishing a subtle and ever-changing emotive context for the text. His technical facility more than meets the demands of the rigorous solo guitar part."
-Richard Greene, Guitar Review Magazine
"Frank Koonce has produced on this disc some of the most beautiful playing and refined sound I have heard recently, always supporting the narration of Don Doyle and both of them exploiting the delicate nuances of interplay between score and text."
-Andy Daly, Classical Music on the Web
Don H. Doyle, is McCausland Professor of History emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He grew up near Berkley, California, graduated from the University of California, Davis, and earned his PhD in history at Northwestern University. He was a Fulbright professor in Rome, Genoa, and Rio de Janeiro and taught at Leeds University in England. He is retired from teaching and lives in Folly Beach, South Carolina.
"My fascination with the past began one summer in California when my mother brought home a shoebox full of letters from my great-great grandfather, a drummer boy from Vermont who served in the Civil War and wrote home to his parents. Without quite realizing it, I became a historian that summer."
His new book, The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln's New Birth of Freedom Remade the World (Princeton, 2024) breaks out of the usual focus on American events to examine the Reconstruction era within a larger international context. This book is a sequel to his acclaimed The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic, 2015), which offered a bold new interpretation of what America's Civil War meant to the wider world.
