A la vuelta de su presentación en Alemania, plena de éxitos, Alqhai & Alqhai te ofrece su nuevo CD + DVD “Las Idas y las Vueltas” junto al que elijas de sus tres anteriores CDs: Le Lacrime di Eros, Les Violes du Ciel et de l’Enfer o Amori di Marte). CD + DVD + otro CD, todo al precio de sólo 29,95 euros, gastos de envío incluidos a cualquier país. Desde el 4 de mayo. Puedes indicar tu elección entre nuestros tres primeros CDs al final de la compra.

Un testimonio del impacto de nuestras Idas y Vueltas en Alemania lo da esta crítica aparecida en la revista Counterpunch:

(…) Tuesday night the plaster busts of the great men of European music looking down from their niches in Berlin’s Konzerthaus and would have smiled if they could as the indefatigable Spanish gambist Rami Alqhai and his band Accademia del Piacere (Academy of Pleasure) set off into new territory with three Flamenco musicians: Arcángel, the most celebrated Flamenco singer of his generation; the sublime Flamenco guitarist Miguel Ángel Cortés; and the expressive percussionist Augustín Diassera. Here again the group’s name (Accademia del Piacere) said it all: never have I heard a more varied, challenging, moving and pleasurable concert. There was no intermission over its two hours, which included the two encores that, with the bowing and hugging, took almost thirty minutes. The last of these was a lament built on the descending tetrachord, a bass-line in heavy use for several centuries, not least in Dido’s Lament and the Crucifixus from the B-Minor mass.

It was the thirty-four year-old Arcángel, a prodigy who won a Fandango contest in Andalusia at the age of ten and is now an international phenomenon, who seemed to rally the ten other musicians on stage and convince them to offer the wildly enthusiastic audience a final dose of the melancholy and fire of which so many of the evening’s songs had been made. With his glistening curls, dusky skin, and shiny two-tone boots, this towering musician seemed to want nothing more than to keep the night going, eager to let his pitch-pure voice ride again above the vivid combination of viols, recorder, baroque and flamenco guitars, and an assortment of drums.

Alqhai began the lament with his own improvised elaboration of this ancient harmonic scheme—a kind of forerunner of the minor blues. Alqhai’s was a plaint of long-held notes soaring with remorse; chromatic feints of doubt and desire; and bowed tremolos in which hope seemed to flicker brightly before being enveloped by darkness. What he made was both sad and tremendously uplifting music that seemed to have taken much from the artistry of Arcángel. The great singer entered into the lament after Alqhai’s long introduction as he did so often through the evening: with a sustained note supported by seemingly endless breath and absolute control of the microtonal nuances of the haunting, chromatically inflected Phrygian mode characteristic of so much Flamenco music. Arcángel has the ability make a single melodic line into a musical epic in itself; but his saturation in the moment works also to create larger dramatic arcs that bring to life the stories told. Melodic subtlety is coupled with tremendous rhythmic control, heard not only in his voice, but his palmas—the varied clapping of his hands and stamping of his feet below his chair.

The encore continued with improvised elaborations by the inventive recorder player, Vicente Parilla, and the fleet and flamboyant baroque guitarist, Enrique Solinis, and soprano Mariví Blasco vocalized her own threnodic choruses. But in the end it was Arcángel’s diminuendo of dying words mingling with the lasts sighs of Alqhai’s viol with which the lament and the concert came to end.

In contrast to this beautiful, tragic conclusion, the evening had also been one of unforgettable bravura moments: the duels between the guitarists in which the thundering descending scale of the flamenco player were answered by the fleet clarity of the baroque virtuoso; the abyss threatened by a near collapse in group improvisation was leapt into by the percussionist Diassera and drum that seemed to sing; and, most memorably, a cell-phone in the audience rang at the close of one of Cortés tremendous fantastical extemporized preludes; Arcángel waited until the offending machine then let silence reign for several seemingly endless seconds as he stared down the perp before finally crying out in song:

Tristes estilos de amor,
la vieja sonanta gime
Sadly, in the style of love songs
The old guitar moans

The idea for, and execution, of this confrontation between early music and flamenco came from Alqhai, who sought to bring together elements of European literate traditions with the indigenous music brought back to Europe from Spain’s colonies, with the sonic residue of the Moors, and with the Flamenco of Andalusia. The collaboration with Arcángel began a year-and-a-half ago and what it has showed so far is that the sonority of the viols, capable of fire and speed but also of plaintive singing, profoundly enriches flamenco’s already vibrant emotional palette with its songs about gypsies, beautiful Moorish women, desperate Andalusian men, lost love and honor. For its part early music ventures into a wider world, more exciting because it is more dangerous. What is created over the sill of this zeitfenster is something that seems new, but in fact is very old.