2009 CIUTAT VELLA FLAMENCO FESTIVAL. MORENTE & TOMATITO
An olé x 30 years
Silvia Calado. Barcelona, May 19th, 2009
Enrique Morente: cante.
Tomatito: guitar. Lucky Losada: box drum.
16th Ciutat Vella Flamenco Festival. Contemporary Culture
Center, Hall. Barcelona, May 19th, 2009. 9 p.m.
The concert with which Taller de Músics
celebrated its 30 years of “musical activism”,
true to its philosophy, avoided the typical pomp of great
anniversaries. Except for the presence of political authorities
and the corresponding security team, the foundation opted
for just the opposite. An intimate stage, the Hall of Barcelona’s
Contemporary Culture Center, a very limited seating capacity
for just four hundred privileged spectators, and a simple
bill of a cantaor with guitar. And therein lay the grandeur
of the celebration: in which cantaor and in which guitarist.
They were none other than Enrique
Morente and Tomatito,
together again after their much-talked-about face-off at
New York’s Carnegie Hall at Flamenco Festival USA
2005.
And Morente himself related it like this
between cantes: “Today, the anniversary is celebrated
of very long work in favor of music. And we have been asked
for a repertoire as serious and as classical as possible.
To that end, we have brought none other than the best guitarist
there is”. The crowd went mad once more. And the cantaor
and guitarist turned the frenzy into contained emotion by
means of a soleá with a dedication. A cante which
is great per se and which the Albaicín-born artist
made very great here. The phases burst with existentialism.
The guitar didn’t miss his glances … or his
soul. And the climate achieved led up to the recital’s
climax in the seguiriya.
They had reached that magical point after
covering that song-poem collection which is now inherent
in Morente; since he is the one who has the key to distilling
the jondo nature of learned verse. He uttered Alberti’s
‘Marinero en tierra’ por alegrías. He
listened to Machado’s chants por bulerías.
And he comforted Lorca’s “guitar weeping”
por cabales. He uttered the words for them to be heard,
adding the right pauses and rests to each message, to each
emotion. Tomatito supported everything he offered with pleasure,
care and wisdom, although the same as the audience; he was
also surprised by nearly every change. No, this cantaor
capable of reeling off Chacón and Lorca in the same
breath of Málaga mountains is not at all predictable.
All of it was condensed in a concert of
scarcely fifty minutes. And a first encore por fandangos,
dotted with sentences as wounding as “everyone who
says I am, it’s because he doesn’t have anyone
to tell him you are” by Toronjo, didn’t comfort
the audience. Far from it. But they endured. And many shouts
and whistles were needed to make them come out again. The
epilogue made the saeteros dance por tangos. And the cantaor’s
now swollen voice received the olé in unison until
that new point. An olé which seemed wider than a
phase. The fundamental doesn’t come together two-fold
every day on the same stage, in the same act. And from here
we extend it to the organization which made it possible,
which makes this festival possible, which has made the musical
effervescence possible from Barcelona to beyond …
and has wished to put the flamenco genre in the foreground
to be celebrated. Olé.
