Fantasía para un Gentilhombre

Andrés Segovia asked Rodrigo for a concerto and received, in 1954, a set of movements built on dance pieces from Gaspar Sanz's guitar instruction book of 1674 — the gentleman of the title being Sanz himself. Segovia gave the first performance with the San Francisco Symphony under Enrique Jordá in March 1958. The orchestra is small, so that the guitar is never covered, and the writing stays deliberately close to the seventeenth-century originals: villano, ricercare, españoleta, canario. It has remained the second of Rodrigo's guitar works in concert frequency, after Aranjuez.