(noticia) Arte y Pureza Flamenco at UC-San Diego

Flamenco Show Brings out the Gypsy in Me
Posted: 01/30/2006 at 11:37:34 AM PST
Updated: 01/30/2006 at 11:44:27 AM PST
by Janice Steinberg

Art can transport us to another time and place. It can even, rarely, surprise us with a larger vision of who we might be, though that's an uncommon and incredibly precious gift. Hearing Maria Peña sing with the Arte y Pureza Flamenco Company last night, I glimpsed my Spanish Gypsy self—a self more sensual, with more poetry and less rationalism in her life, one who doesn't place so much of her value in her work. A self—a gift—I experienced as a softening through my body, as Peña carried on a musical conversation with her husband, guitarist Antonio Moya.

Just the two of them sat on simple folding chairs at the front of UCSD's Mandeville Auditorium stage, as they might sit at home in Utrera, a town southeast of Seville. Peña listened silently for the first few minutes as Moya played. He gazed intently at her. Her focus was internal, taking the music inside of her, a moment of such intimacy that my more poetic Gypsy self might call it holy. Ah, and then she sang. Peña's voice contains some of the scratched-throat quality I've heard in other flamenco singers, but there's sweetness and liquid, too, an operatic melisma that, I believe, characterizes the cante of Utrera. Her songs told stories, and knowledge of more than tourist Spanish would have made the experience of hearing her richer. Still, it didn't take a linguist to understand her voice weeping as if she were channeling the pain of the world, or the lightheartedness with which she ended; nor to marvel at the conviction with which she made that complex emotional journey.

(leer +) [vía sandiego.com]