Concert de Gaudí

Concert de Gaudí is a concerto for classical guitar and orchestra by the American composer Christopher Rouse. The work was jointly commissioned by Norddeutscher Rundfunk and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for the guitarist Sharon Isbin, with additional contributions from Richard and Jody Nordlof, to whom the piece is dedicated. It was completed August 1, 1999 and premiered in Hamburg, January 2, 2000, with Isbin and the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Orchester led by conductor Christoph Eschenbach. The piece was later awarded the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Concert de Gaudí has a duration of roughly 25 minutes and is composed in three movements:

The piece was inspired by the work of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí, after whom the concerto is titled. Rouse wrote of this inspiration in the score program notes, saying:

In conceiving a guitar concerto, my thoughts went immediately to the great Spanish tradition of music for this instrument, and it seemed logical for me to exhibit my admiration for this tradition in my own composition. This in turn led me to reflect upon the work of the extraordinary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, hence the Catalan-language title for the concerto. What has always struck me particularly strongly about Gaudí is his quintessentially Spanish combination of surrealism and mysticism, and I strove to include these elements in this score.

Towards this end, I used that music which most might well recognize as archetypically Spanish — flamenco — as a foundation for the score. I then proceeded to "melt," "bend," and otherwise transform this material into something I hoped would be musically akin to the way in which Gaudí would take a traditional design and add fanciful, phantasmagoric touches to make it unlike the work of any other architect. As a result, there is an intentionally "unfocused" quality to the musical language of my piece, which ranges from clear, traditional tonality to music of substantive chromaticism.

...
Wikipedia