Israel
Galván and Carmen Linares get the audience to agree
at the 2005 Caja Madrid Festival. There had not been
such unanimity since the start of the thirteenth edition of
the Madrid-based festival. Before Carmen
Linares, the crowd seemed more than pleased. The cante lady's
reliability is unquestionable; she never gets less than a "B".
Equaled in elegance by Juan Carlos Romero on guitar, she reeled
off an anthological repertoire, full of references to the great
maestros. The providential voice of the Jaén-born cantaora
took the shape of malagueña and rondeña, cantiñas,
taranta, tientos-tangos, seguiriya with cabal and bulerías,
also accompanied by Antonio Coronel on percussion, Paco Cruzado
on second guitar and Ana and Javier González on clapping.
It was all warmly applauded and there was even the urge for
an encore: the delightful fandango ‘La luz que a mí
me alumbraba’. The reaction to Israel Galván was
hard to predict. As he himself says, he can cause anything from
indignation to a standing ovation. And on this occasion, the
venture was triumphant. The bailaor, breaking-off personified,
made participants in his free game out of cantaor Fernando
Terremoto - sublime in all his appearances - and guitarist
Alfredo Lagos -entirely upright and clear -. The proposal surprised,
amused and convinced even the staunchest supporters of the status
quo, since what they were offering was truth. The performance
was cooked up with just baile, cante and toque cemented in classical
flamenco, but deconstructed, but unwrapped around three different
attitudes and, at the same time compatible... with varying top
quality. Soleá, caña, fandango, malagueña,
tientos, alegrías, bulerías... and rests. So much
three-fold knowledge, so much shared complicity. And the baile,
stellar. How is it possible to make so much complexity understandable?
Israel Galván's genius goes way beyond that.
