It may seem inevitable that the prolific Luigi Boccherini, an Italian working in Spain and thus drawing inspiration from two guitar-crazed countries, would eventually write music for the guitar. And so he did, near the end of his career, but his eight surviving guitar quintets (the numbering goes up to nine, but No. 8 has been lost) are merely afterthoughts, transcriptions of earlier non-guitar works. His Guitar Quintet No. 2 is a straightforward arrangement of his Piano Quintet No. 4, Op. 57, yet it is perfectly idiomatic for the guitar. The opening movement, Maestoso assai, keeps the guitar well-integrated into the instrumental texture, providing a rippling undercurrent for a musical argument dominated by the first violin. A noble, processional figure launches the sonata-form movement that subjects its pleasant but not especially memorable themes to an array of unexpected modulations. In the second movement, an Adagio section leads from what initially seems to be a dotted rhythm Baroque "ouverture" into a sweetly lyrical passage; this is all a set-up for the main Allegretto, which skips and trills from the major mode to the minor and back again without casting any deep shadows along the way. The finale is a minuet that Boccherini designated "Polacca," because of the outer sections' eastern European syncopations and readiness to slip between major and minor. The central section initially seems like more generic, Classical-era minuet material, but before this has a chance to develop, the dark-hued syncopations take over, smoothly leading back into the A-section music.

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