Paco de Lucia

Since 1964 when he made his first solo record Paco de Lucia has been if not the foremost flamenco player in Spain, certainly an immensely popular musician of great skill and influence. He has been called the God of the guitar and of the little that I have heard of his music, there is a majestic confidence and miraculous fluidity to his playing. He also looks impressive and is clearly a charismatic and dynamic performer, his long fingers covering the strings like quick silver, the music sometimes unbelievably fast.

He is seen as the founder of the new modern flamenco style which moves out of but, he insists, is never far beyond the traditional form of flamenco with rhythm, song and dance. de Lucia shrugs off the concerns that he might lose his roots or betray the essence of flamenco. "I have never lost my roots in my music, because I would lose myself," he once said. "What I have tried to do is have a hand holding onto tradition and the other scratching, digging in other places trying to find new things I can bring into flamenco. There was a time when I was concerned about losing myself," he added, "but not now. I've realised that, even if I wanted, I couldn't do anything else. I am a flamenco guitarist. If I tried to play anything else it would still sound like flamenco."

Early in his career, in 1968, he met Camaron de la Isla, one of the premier flamenco singers. They made more than 10 records. Their album Potro de Rabia y Miel (1991), the first by them since 1984, was probably the last release by Camaron de la Isla, who died in 1992. Together they made a huge contribution to the new music of Spain.

Flamenco is by definition, a dialogue between individual but inter-related musicians. de Lucia has travelled widely and in doing so has been a member of several groups whose variety of instruments may have offended the flamenco purists. His own sextet in the 1980’s, included bass, drums, and saxophone and he collaborated, especially with jazz musicians, most notably with pianist Chick Corea and fellow guitarist John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and Al DiMeola. The often dazzling results of these collaborations have been documented in several releases including the guitar trio albums Castro Marin (1979). He has toured with the Jose Greco company, written music for the theatre, ballet and cinema, pushing the boundaries of his art to new limits, but never far beyond its original inspiration.

Regular readers of these postings will recognise that I have little knowledge of Paco de Lucia other than I have picked up on the internet. There’s quite a lot to see, and several videos on U Tube (see below) and elsewhere to hear. Clearly a great artist.
B.R.

Carlos Guastavino (1910-2000)

In the Spanish version of these postings, we quite often get comments from South American readers and just recently I heard from a person who lives in Argentine. She writes enthusiastically about the pianist Nora Alvarez and I have been looking at her website, http://www.nora-alvarez.com.ar/-9k where you can hear some of her music. Her recordings include works by Guastavino, an Argentinean composer who is new to me and who therefore I have been researching.

He was born in Santa Fe and at first studied chemical engineering but then won a scholarship that made it possible for him to study at the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires, later studying in Europe. He wrote a number of songs and song cycles as well as chamber music, sonatas for guitar and piano, and orchestral pieces. His ballets ‘Once Upon a Time’ and the ‘Suite Argentina’ are apparently typical of his use of national traditional dance rhythms and melodies, and were performed in London, Paris, Barcelona and Havana by the Ballet Espanol of Isabel Lopez. An excellent pianist, he performed his works in Great Britain, the U.S.S.R. and China. Many famous artists including Teresa Berganza and Jose Carreras have included his songs in their programmes and recordings.

I have traced with the help of our local CD Shop a recording of some of his music for piano duet. Originally on one of the cheap Naxos discs, it is now published on their more expensive Marco Polo label, 8.223462, which I collected from my dealer today. This is really lovely music, delicate and elegant but then at other times robust and always seductively rhythmical. On the disc there is what I imagine to be a broad and representative selection of his music with four pieces that stand on their own and then four collected pieces such as the Romance del Plata which begins the programme and Las Presencias that concludes it. I particularly enjoyed his arrangement of one of his songs, The Dove, which is typical of the delightful fluency of many of these pieces.

Unusually, the music on this disc combines two valuable qualities. The music is undemanding and easy to listen to but at the same time it rewards careful and appreciative listening. The excellent pianists are Hector Moreno and Norberto Capelli, who apparently have been playing together since 1974.

B.R.

Naxos to the Rescue

One of the phenomenal musical success stories of recent times is Naxos, the brainchild of Klaus Heymann, a Hong Kong-based business man and Music Executive.The cheap label CD has transformed the recording world. Initially employing lesser known soloists and orchestras, playing standard works but also neglected music until then unrecorded, the label now has an enormous repertoire. There are over 40 discs in their Spanish series for example, some of which we have referred to in these blogs. They have an even larger collection of American music and many works by English composers which have been given new and sometimes first recordings in excellent performances.

One of the problems for people who love music but are not musically trained is how to make sense of the musical terms used in programme notes at a concert or included with a CD. It is important for the careful listener to know something about composers, their personal story and their works. Naxos has come to the rescue and met both needs in their website Naxos.com.

There they have a large section called EDUCATION. ‘ Hearing classical music in a concert can leave you feeling refreshed and energized’, they say. ‘It can be fun. It can be romantic. It can be spiritual. It can also scare you to death. Classical music concerts can seem like snobby affairs full of foreign terminology and peculiar behavior. It can be hard to understand what's going on. It can be hard to know how to act’. And so they provide masses of information for people listening in their own homes, or present at a concert.

There is a comprehensive glossary of musical terms, from A for Accelerando (an Italian word meaning becoming faster, so this is music played at an increasing speed) to X for Xylophone (a percussion instrument with sets of horizontal wooden bars struck by wooden sticks used by composers from the nineteenth century onwards for special effect) and helpful articles including an Introduction to Classical Music summarising its history, as well as a description of musical categories and the instruments used by the modern symphony orchestra. There is also a section on the A to Z of Opera.

It’s all very impressive and although we don’t use technical terms in these postings, the Naxos website could be a useful accompaniment to them. Euroresidentes have been wondering if we could do something like this ourselves. Naxos has done it for us!

B.R.