The time has passed when one version of either of these two works for guitar and orchestra stood out clearly from its rivals on musical grounds, any of the selected comparisons, all of which couple the Concierto with the Fantasia, is quite good enough to represent these pieces in anyone's collection. So, not for the first time, one's choice may depend on what else (if anything) there is on the same disc, this new recording does little to make the chooser's life any easier. Bitetti is a long-experienced concerto soloist—he has recorded both these works before, and he is as well equipped as anyone else to give a first-class account of them; here, however, he is somewhat 'backgrounded'. Some of the soloist's lines are either swamped by the orchestra, particularly in the Concierto (where some writing is less 'realistic' than the composer believes it to be), or audible only with difficulty; the guitar sounds distant and its tone at times thin. Given a better balanced recording, the musical attributes of the performances would have commended them as strongly as most others.
It is when play enters extra time that this disc picks up the points that make choice a little harder. None of the three solo items has any other CD recording and only En los trigales (''In the wheatfields'') has any on LP either, which should attract Rodrigophiles. Most of Rodrigo's solo guitar pieces prompt the instrument's abundant amateur following to think: ''I'd like to play that''; the Pastorale and the three-movement Sonata (just over seven minutes long) have the kind of directness and economy that might extend the above thought—''and maybe I can''. Bitetti lingers more romantically than most in the wheatfields but the other two solo pieces are more attentive to the pulse, and none the worse for it. The outer movements of the Sonata say nothing that Rodrigo has not said many times before, they merely reduce it to its simplest terms. The recording of the solo items is unexceptionable.'