“We understand each other well. I let him go where he wants and he always takes me where I want.” “He is so much like me that I have come to believe that he dreams my same dreams.” Warm Andalusia with rustic landscapes between streams and butterflies, skies and sunsets, is the backdrop to one of the most famous stories of friendship in world literature. The “little poem” that took 9 years to Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramon Jimenez, tells of a small, soft and gentle donkey, who accompanies the author himself through the streets of Moguer, between reality and fantasy. A bond of friendship so strong that the author reads the events of his life and the world around him through the eyes and feelings of his friend, transforming the monologue into a debate with one voice but many thoughts.
Through Platero, his games, his clear eyes, we rediscover the lightness of childhood, with its naive and genuine freedom that is forgotten as we grow up. Juan Ramon Jimenez explores this friendship and the reflections of the soul, according to the course of nature, which like the cycle of life leads to detachment and the serene acceptance of a new passage.
A tale as sweet as its protagonist, written for adults to whom it speaks like children who have grown up too quickly, «Platero Y Yo» deeply impressed, among others, the composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco who set to music 28 of its most beautiful and significant chapters, creating a work for narrator and guitar that is at the same time extremely complex and splendidly light.
From this union of poetic literature and literary music, one of the theatrical masterpieces of the 20th century is born. Ugo Dighero together with his friend Christian Lavernier brings this timeless text back on tour in a guise where voice and guitar move in unison. Voice becomes instrument, instrument becomes voice in a harmonic game that opens up to new imaginative readings of the text. A philosophical fairy tale that speaks “also” to children, where the great expressive skills of Ugo Dighero see the maximum field of action, between words and music.
