Federico Moreno Torroba’s Guitar Concertos

Andrés Segovia at a Concerts Ysaÿe recital in Brussels in 1932 (pencil-on-paper sketch by Hilda Wiener, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

I first became aware of Spanish composer Federico Moreno Torroba through my recordings of guitarist Andrés Segovia. Moreno Torroba both was born in Madrid (March 3, 1891) and died there (September 12, 1982). He and Segovia became close friends in the Twenties, which resulted in a prodigious number of compositions for guitar. (Sadly, Segovia’s American record producers listed the composer as “Torroba,” rather than following the Spanish convention of “Moreno Torroba.” The old Schwann record catalogs, on the other hand, got it right!) While most of them were solos, he also wrote several concertos for guitar and orchestra. Naxos collected recordings of all of these concertos, released on two single-CD volumes, the first in January of 2015, followed by the second on April 14, 2017.

The conductor for this project was Manuel Coves, leading the Málaga Philharmonic Orchestra on the first volume and the Extremadura Symphony Orchestra on the second. Solo work was shared by the same two guitarists on both albums, Pepe Romero and Manuel Coves, one of Romero’s pupils and the conductor’s brother. Not all of the selections are explicitly called concertos, but they are all multi-movement compositions for guitar and orchestra. Since this is a relatively limited genre, the first volume also offers two suites for solo guitar, “Aires [tunes] de La Mancha” and “Suite castellana,” which is probably Moreno Torroba’s earliest solo composition for guitar.

These two Naxos releases serve up an aspect of repertoire that is seldom encountered in the United States. The Winter 1998–99 Schwann (which I think was their last publication) lists only a handful of recorded compositions. One reason may be that, while the concertos certainly provide the soloist with many opportunities to display technical skills, the instrumental music tends to be on the syrupy side. This may reflect the fact that Moreno Torroba also composed a prodigious number of zarzuelas, which tend to serve as the Spanish take on “light opera.”

That said, the selections on these two albums provide a valuable account of the relationship between the composer and Segovia, which is likely to inform better those listening to Segovia recordings as well as those interested in the genre of the guitar concerto.