DESCRIPTION

Platero and I: a lyric portrait of life in a remote Andalusian village; a masterpiece written by Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature, melodized by Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, known as one of the foremost guitar composers in the twentieth century. 

Cervantes Institute, the Embassy of Spain in Athens, Theatro Technis and the Centre of Vocal Arts present for the first time in Greece the renown piece by Jiménez and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, with baritone Spyros Sakkas in the role of the narrator & singer, and Nikos Zarkos in the guitar. 

The story displays the rural life in Moguer, Jiménez’ hometown, through the eyes of the narrator and his faithful companion, Platero, a silver-colored donkey. The poetic element of Platero and I is Jiménez’s masterful use of the natural rhythm of the Spanish language to generate melodic sentences that are flexible in syntax and in the use of clause structures—sentences that produce the almost cinematographic effects of slow motion and close-up and wide-angle views. Likewise, Tedesco masterfully used  Jiménez’s rhythm and melodic structure to compose a guitar work with great variety, complexity and ultimately challenging.