“To make matters worse, it will be in a place that for geeks like me is amazing: where maestro Paco de Lucía recorded the ‘Aranjuez Concert’.” This is how excited the guitarist David de Arahal was yesterday before his concert, together with the singer Sandra Carrasco, at the Teatro Bulevar, inside the Torrelodones Flamenco Festival. The Madrid town celebrates its twenty-first edition this week, with photography exhibitions and performances, which will close this Saturday with a final gala in which a large part of the musicians who formed the two sextets of the composer of ‘Entre dos Aguas’ will participate.
A table was also held yesterday in which the different revolutions carried out by Paco de Lucía before his death were analyzed. None other than the singer Carmen Linares, Princess of Asturias Prize for the Arts 2022, participated; the journalist and musicologist José Manuel Gamboa, producer of several Enrique Morente albums; César Suárez, author of the biography ‘The enigma of Paco de Lucía’ (Lumen, 2024); the famous guitarist Víctor Monge ‘Serranito’ and the recently appointed director of the festival, Niño Josele.
«We have a lot to thank Paco, because he dedicated his entire life to flamenco. He left his life thinking about how he could make it great. We owe him a lot for the place that the Spanish guitar and flamenco in general occupy today,” said the Princess of Asturias award winner, who then gave advice to the youngest: “What you have to do is listen to what was done before , reach figures like the guitarist Miguel Borrull (1866-1926), who will then help you move forward. “We must always carry tradition hand in hand.”
“Paco always told me: ‘Even if you play jazz or whatever music you want, always take Andalusia with you,'” added Niño Josele before giving way to the concert by Sandra Carrasco and David de Arahal, on the same stage where 23 years ago Paco de Lucía performed the ‘Aranjuez Concert’ in the presence of the nonagenarian composer Joaquín Rodrigo. A few days that his then-wife, Casilda Varela, lived with him, and in April she told the journalist Nacho Serrano: «Paco was really overwhelmed by the difficulty of that project that he insisted on carrying out. I know he was having a hard time, I saw signs of anxiety in him, although it was logical. “He faced a monumental work solely with his intuition, without knowing music theory.”
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