Knowing that Rafael Riqueni is back on stage turns the entire experience of the eponymous documentary, which this Friday is presented at the In-Edit festival with the presence of the maestro, on its head. A trip to hell for this guitarist, considered by many to be the successor of Paco de Lucía. His father's suicide broke his heart into a thousand pieces, turning his life into a barren field from which the disease that tormented him arose, a bipolar disorder and with it alcohol, misery and prison, only to reappear years later. in the María Luisa park in Seville, the Eden that helped him recover the music that he always carried inside him.
“I'm at the best of my career, even better than when I was young,” Riqueni says happily from the mental health clinic on the outskirts of Seville, where he has lived for five years. “I work more than when I was young, I play better concerts, I am around the guitar all day, thinking about it,” he comments, proud of having recently received a new award, the National Flamenco Guitar award from the Jerez Chair of Flamencology, which add to all the awards obtained as a young man.
To reach this happy ending, it has taken more than ten years of work, an odyssey that the documentary reflects, born from the efforts of Paco Bech, director of the film, Riqueni's manager and his helping hand, the one who took him out of Amor school. of God in Madrid where he lived hopelessly. A child prodigy of the flamenco guitar, Riqueni had published six albums when in 1997 the suicide of his father took him away from music. He fell into the pit of depression and alcohol until he ended up in the teachers' room of the Madrid school, colonized in 2011 by cans of beer and cigarettes, the remains of the daily life of a Riqueni who lived there for want of something. better. “I didn't believe in myself, I didn't play the guitar except when Enrique Morente called me, I felt terrible,” explains the musician about those years. “It's a good thing Paco arrived, because if not, I'll die on the way.”
Riqueni, the protagonist, has not yet seen the documentary, “I guess I'll see it in Barcelona,” but he doesn't need to to remember how much he owes to Paco Berch, whose meeting was a turning point. It was he who encouraged him to resume recordings of what years later would become Parque de María Luisa. “It meant a beginning. I had lost the technique I had when I was young, it took me 10 years to recover it.” Abandoned by himself, Riqueni had to start from scratch: “My music is very complex and at that time I was not technically qualified to play it.”
His first attempts to return to some scores that “were in the dust” failed. “When I reread them I saw that some were not useful, I had to expunge them and from there we started working. Afterwards I wrote the string and wind arrangements and we began to shape the album.”
The road to recovery passed through a farm in Huelva where he could get away from alcohol, rediscover his music and stabilize his illness while giving private classes to earn an income. When everything seemed on track, he was imprisoned for a pending trial in 2010, at the worst of his illness.
The promoters turned their backs on him, but he still published Parque de María Luisa, whose memory is still present in Riqueni's memory. “I am very lucky to have a city full of charms, and the park is for me the essence of Seville.” As explained in the documentary, the challenge was huge, because they wanted to make an album at the height of the legend, and they achieved it “because we had done what had to be done, there is a very small step from something serious to something tacky, That's why we had to take great care of the effects, and there are the birds, the ducks and the rain.”
“Every day I do technique exercises, especially for the right hand, to get in shape, and then I am playing various virtuosic songs,” Riqueni explains about his current daily life, in which he dedicates several hours to playing pieces like Ímpetu , by Mario Escudero, or La Guajira, by Paco de Lucía. “The other day the idea of a soleá por bulerías came to me and I finished it in three days, and I say, what is this? It is very difficult, very flamenco, it sounds new, it is a gift that someone who is not here has given me.”
In his concerts he is currently accompanied by a guitar by Andrés Marvi, a German living in the Alpujarra, “he brought me two fantastic guitars to the clinic, and I kept one,” he says of the instrument with which he makes his music. “I think it is the best guitar I have ever had in my life, it has natural reverb, the triple is very sweet, the bass is very low, with a lot of presence, and a very good volume, because guitars with German spruce tops do not sound until some time after playing it, but it sounds now, just finished.”
Riqueni does not dislike being compared to Maestro De Lucía, “no one is bitter about a sweet treat,” but he plays it down by asking why “in everything in life there has to be a number one.” And he remembers that being an elite guitarist “is not something that one chooses; It is given to you and it does not even belong to you, because the only destiny of having a gift is to give it to the public.” A gift that only bears fruit through effort. “That's why the public is so surprised at us when all we've done is have a gift and work long hours.”
