Accademia del Piacere / Fahmi Alqhai / Marivi Blasco LE LACRIME DI EROS

LE LACRIME DI EROS

Accademia del Piacere / Fahmi Alqhai / Arcángel LAS iDAS Y LAS VUELTAS

With the welcome issue on Glossa of Las idas y las vueltas, evidence of the new spirit of musicmaking from Spain is coming through no more clearly than with Fahmi Alqhai’s previous releases (A piacere and Rediscovering Spain have been recent issues). Las idas y las vueltas is an exuberant display of music-making in its own right but also a demonstration of the interrelationship between Spanish Baroque music and flamenco.

The melting pot of melodies, colours and rhythms that followed in the wake of Spain’s colonial expansion brought together European, South American and African influences. On Las idas y las vueltas, there is a constant to-ing and fro-ing of such influences – jácaras and guarachas, folías, Las morillas de Jaén and La Spagna, bulerías and jaleos – all brought to musical life by the cantaor Arcángel, the flamenco guitarist Miguel Ángel Cortés and the Baroque instrumentalists of Alqhai’s Accademia del Piacere, and the singer Mariví Blasco.

This new release comes with two bonus tracks, both recorded live and previously unreleased: a pasacalle and a new version of ¡Ay, que me abraso! The whole album has been freshly remixed by Alqhai and his team in their studio in Seville.

Núria Rial / Fahmi Alqhai / Accademia del Piacere MUERA CUPIDO

Catalan soprano Núria Rial is a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque music, particularly in the works of Monteverdi and Handel, and she is well-versed in European art songs. She attended the Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona, where she earned diplomas in voice and piano, and advanced to the City of Basel Music Academy, where she studied with Kurt Widmer and received the solo vocalist diploma. In 2003, she received the Helvetia Patria Jeunesse Foundation Prize from the European Foundation for Culture. Rial has performed with many period ensembles and chamber orchestras in repertoire that encompasses Baroque and Classical opera, and the vocal music of France, Germany, Spain, and her native Catalonia. She has appeared as a guest artist at many festivals in Europe and South America, and sung in operatic productions at the Innsbruck Theatre, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and the Grand Théâtre in Geneva. Rial has recorded with Sony Classical, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Mirare, and Glossa. (Blair Sanderson)

Accademia del Piacere / Fahmi Alqhai / Arcángel LAS IDAS Y LAS VUELTAS

It is race-mixing and the exchange of ideas that normally start the process of music innovation. In this sense, the colonization of America by the Spaniards, which encouraged the meeting of European, American and African cultures, boosted the birth, evolution and breeding of brand new music styles. The exchange of different kinds of rhythms, tunes and cadences which, centuries later, would give birth to jazz, had already been the origin of flamenco.

All over the Andalusian and American towns people could hear songs and dances that had been originated here and had gone there to come back again, sometimes to eventually travel overseas anew. From the Guinean Gulf to the Caribbean, then to Triana and the Bay of Cádiz, these tunes continually melt, overlapped, in a delocalized, bubbling melting pot, where jácaras, folías and chaconas existed as a common heritage both to popular and educated music. It is normal then, for instance, to listen to Guarachas de Zéspedes which remind us of Cádiz tanguillos, or to discover medieval romances which had been preserved in the oral tradition, fandangos of yore and today, siguiriyas set to the chords of a passacaglia. In short, pieces of music that were written down centuries ago which can be brought to life today thanks to the spontaneous intuition of good musicians and, of course, good flamenco.

The inspired souls of Fahmi Alqhai and Arcángel have set their minds to walk up the still-unexplored paths that result of the fertile combination of flamenco and Baroque music. Arcángel and Alqhai keep a dialogue which enables them to delve into a common past and present with the help of music, a universal vehicle to brotherhood between nations and cultures. With strong, difficult to classify personalities, these artists combine a strict, academic music education along with a restless, experimental spirit. Therefore, they will let themselves be freely driven by their sheer music instinct. Who knows? Maybe, in a natural, unexpected, intuitive way, they will bring back the original sources of the remote flamenco, that Paradise Lost which no musicologist ever found before. (Juan Ramón Lara / Seville, January 2012)