ESTRELLA MORENTE, ‘ESTRELLA 1922’. MADRID'S SPANISH THEATER

They were wrong

Silvia Calado. Madrid, October 6th, 2005

	Estrella Morente (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

What an uproar there is in Madrid when Estrella Morente sings. I've half-stolen the phrase from journalist Josefina Carabias in the interview she did with La Niña de los Peines in the Spanish capital in the year 1935. The forces of law and order had to step in to calm down the fans. Next, thirteen years after Granada's Cante Jondo Contest, Pastora, “the best cantaora in Spain, is disillusioned with cante and wants to retire”. And the thing is she finds “that cante is going down the wrong road”. If she'd been at the Spanish Theater tonight, on October 6th, 2005, all her fears about the future of cante would have gone away. Hers and those of the intellectuals who organized the contest now evoked, brandishing the motto which, in the voice of Enrique Morente, illustrated the prologue's audiovisual: “A people's musical soul is on the road to oblivion”. Nearly a century later, it must be said that they were wrong.

Estrella Morente, a professed lover of that time when artistic philosophy was a weapon to fight with, looks back in time and dusts off flamenco's traditional song book, in order to give it new life, another raison d'être. And she does so completely immersed as an artist, in the style of flamenco's prima donnas in the past: in the poses, in the wardrobe, in the art of dancing with little, in the audience's absolute awareness... And in giving it her all when singing. Moreover, tonight she sang a little less refined, more to earth, less to air, perhaps infected by the naturalness of the group of artists from Sacromonte she was surrounded by. With them, and a band of lutes recreating the sound of the thirties, she performed the first part of the show. To warm up the ambience, she first let them do... a bit of what they know how to do so well in the caves of Granada. She next appeared as a goddess from another time, wrapped up in a huge embroidered shawl and dressed with a thousand flounces and V-neck. And she sang, danced and performed nostalgic sounds of days gone by. Her voice simply flows. Tangos, zambra, pasodoble, verdiales. The audience was literally left gaping by such a captivating artist.

Estrella Morente (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

The second part resorted to withdrawal, to the simplest, most primitive format. Cantaora and guitar. And not just any guitar, but Tomatito's. Dressed in bluish velvet, together with a portrait of her admired María Zambrano, she sang maturely, brilliantly and with sought-after beauty through malagueñas, seguiriyas, tangos and bulerías. The seguiriyas were piercing, like a vocal trance. And the bulerías... the thing is that nobody plays bulerías like Tomatito. And so attests the crowd with thunderous applause. They're hardly allowed to finish, when the silhouette of Estrella, attired in a sensational white bata de cola, can be made out in the distance, making sketches with her body upon ‘El amor brujo’ by Manuel de Falla, the piece which Pastora Imperio had the composer do for her in 1915. Past, present, dream and reality are very nearly jumbled. And then the silhouette disappears, the spotlights go on and the end is marked. Of course, there was a party but not through bulerías; it was rather through dense, sensual Granada tangos. Dolores la Porrona and Estrella Morente challenge one another in the second encore. There is a third... and a fourth. Though here there was no need for the forces of law and order to step in.

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