Knowing that Rafael Riqueni is returning to the stage turns the entire experience of the homonymous documentary that is presented this Friday at the In-Edit festival with the presence of the maestro. A journey to hell for this guitarist, considered by many to be Paco de Lucía's successor. His father's suicide broke his heart into a thousand pieces, so that he turned his life into a wasteland from which sprang the illness that has tortured him, bipolar disorder, along with alcohol, the misery and prison, to reappear years later in the Sevillian María Luisa park, the Eden that helped him recover a music he has always carried inside.
"I'm in the best moment of my career, even better than when I was young", says Riqueni 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 do better concerts, I spend all day with the guitar", he says, proud of having recently received a new award, the National Flamenco Guitar Award from the Cátédra de Flamencologia de Jerez, which adds to all the awards he got when he was young.
To reach this happy ending, it took more than ten years of work, an odyssey that reflects the documentary, born from the eagerness of Paco Berch, director of the film, Riqueni's manager and his friendly hand, who took him out of the Amor de Dios school in Madrid, where he lived evicted. Child prodigy of the flamenco guitar, Riqueni had released six albums released when his father's suicide in 1997 took him away from music. He fell into the well 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 waiting of something better. "I didn't believe in myself, I didn't play the guitar, I felt terrible", explains the musician about those years. "It's still good that Paco arrived, because if it wasn't for him, I would have died 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 it to remember everything he owes to Paco Berch. Their meeting was a turning point. He encouraged him to resume the recordings of what years later would be Parque de María Luisa. "It meant a beginning. I had lost the technique I had when I was young, it took me ten years to recover it". Abandoned, Riqueni had to start from scratch: "My music is very complex and at the time I was not technically qualified to play it".
The first attempts to resume some scores that "were among the dust" failed. "When I reread them, I saw that there were some that were not useful, I had to delete them and from there we started working. Then I already wrote the string and wind arrangements and we started to shape the album".
The road to recovery passed through a farm in Huelva where he could get away from alcohol, reconnect with his music and stabilize his illness while giving private lessons to earn an income. When everything seemed to be on track, he was sent to prison for a pending trial in 2010, at the worst of his illness.
The promoters turned their backs on him, but, nevertheless, he published Parque de María Luisa. The memory of the album is still present in Riqueni's memory. "I am very lucky to have a city full of enchantment, and the park for me is the essence of Seville". As explained in the documentary, the challenge was huge, since they wanted to make an album that lived up to the legend, and he succeeded, "because we had done what was necessary, there is a very small step of something serious to a vulgarity, that's why we had to be very careful with the effects, there are birds, ducks and rain”.
"Every day I do technique exercises, especially for my right hand, to get in shape, and then I play different virtuoso themes", Riqueni explains about his current daily life, in which he spends a few hours playing pieces such as now Ímpetu, by Mario Escudero, and La Guajira, by Paco de Lucía. "The other day I came up with the idea of a soleá for buleries and I finished it in three days, and I said: 'What is this?' It is very difficult, very flamenco, it seems new, it is a gift that I it was done by someone who is not here".
Riqueni is not sorry to be compared to Maestro De Lucía: "I don't dislike hearing things like that". But it takes away its importance when you ask why "in everything in life there must be a number one". And he remembers that being an elite guitarist "is not chosen; it already comes as standard and doesn't even belong to you, because the only purpose 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 by us when all we've done is have a gift and work long hours."
