The guitarist Rafael Riqueni returns a year after his last performance in Barcelona to premiere his latest album Nerja in the city. His concert today (Conservatori del Liceu, 8:30 p.m.) is part of the Barcelona International Jazz Festival, within the De Cajón! cycle, and he is also once again under his aura of being considered the best living flamenco guitarist.
In any case, the glorious tocaor will come this time not solo, like last year, but accompanied in order to properly bring the aforementioned album to life: two other guitarists (Salvador Gutiérrez and Manuel de la Luz), the cellist Gretchen Talbot and as a dancer, his niece Carmela Riqueni. La Vanguardia subscribers have a 15% discount on the price of tickets, provided they are purchased at Entradas de Vanguardia.
The guitarist says about the evening in Barcelona that "in the first part I will only play songs from my previous album Herencia, then I will remember with musicians and dance a little the Parque de María Luisa, which is my previous album and finally we will focus on Nerja" .
In relation to this last album, Riqueni (Seville, 1962) explains that “above all it is a descriptive work, along the lines of Parque..., that is, Spanish music along the lines of Turina, Falla or Albéniz. It includes all the harmonies and ways of building that characterized them, but it is also a work with a lot of flamenco imprint. I think that what I do, apart from being classical Andalusian music, has a lot to do with flamenco, because I'm a flamenco guitarist”.
The record closes his trilogy of Andalusian music (the previous releases were Suite Sevilla, 1993, and the aforementioned Parque de María Luisa, from five years ago). Nerja, which drinks from the young people who discovered the famous prehistoric cave, premiered a few months ago at the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris for three days with enormous success.
His latest album Herencia, released last year and solo, was nominated for the 2021 Latin Grammy. Were you surprised?
Well, yes, a surprise because it's not exactly a commercial record but rather a solo flamenco guitar one.
When they tell you that you are the best flamenco guitarist alive, what happens to your ego?
I take it well, and it makes me want to continue playing and be with the public, which is my adrenaline, because going on stage makes me very excited. But at the same time, yes, I am a shy and embarrassing person and I never know how I am going to respond to compliments.
How would you explain to a neophyte the difference between flamenco and the classical Andalusian music you were talking about earlier?
Actually there is little difference, because both are very close to each other. Andalusian classical music has drawn a lot from flamenco, just as now for some time now we flamencos have drawn a lot from the classics. There is a part of information that is passing from one music to another.
You have recently said that before the appearance of your last two albums, the aforementioned Herencia and Parque de María Luisa, you had gone through some very difficult years in which you felt lost. Can you explain something else?
I have spent at least fifteen years without recording and going through a major crisis due to an illness, and that is that I was bipolar. I was poorly medicated, they didn't medicate me well and then I found myself in a rather dark world of my life, in which I effectively lost confidence in myself and left the guitar a bit abandoned. And many years have passed before I have fully recovered, thank God, and have returned to the guitar. What happens is that I have come back with incredible strength, because when I recovered physically and from all the things that I had from alcohol and others, my organs have recovered very well and that has made me feel very well and that I have recorded two discs in a row. And now a third that...
… Yes?
It is commissioned by an American company and they have told me to do versions of famous songs like Whitney Houston's Bodyguard, Santana's Europa, a beautiful song by Eric Clapton that he dedicates to his son, one of the Police... Inside Little by little we start to record firmly, and it will be just me with a guitar and then attack with two others.
Recovering from your illness fifteen years later, how do you interpret it?
It seems to me an incredible thing, because it is not easy to recover from where I came from, and not everyone comes out of it. But I have gone out and I have strengthened myself with my health, thank God with my guitar, my family. I have recovered many things that I had lost.
You have precisely said that virtuosity has it parked. Do you want to get it back?
Now I really don't mind giving so many notes; I recreate myself more in the music and I play more slowly. And the truth is, I like it more now than when I was young.
