Carmen Linares with Juan Carlos Romero

Carmen
Linares
with
Juan Carlos Romero

4th november,
Teatro Central.
Seville.

Tuesday November 4th.
Nine o’clock at night. No tickets left for the opening
of the new season of the series Flamenco Viene del Sur, which
unfolds at Seville’s Teatro Central. Carmen Linares
is in charge of breaking the ice..

Her small figure appears on stage and the audience applauds.
In rondeña she recalls the sounds of Málaga.
With the first ‘ay’ that warms her throat all
those present fall silent. A folk ‘abandolao’
closes out the cante as she squeezes her fists tightly and
clutches her chest in thrall.

Cantiñas de Cádiz gets authoritatively right
down to the essence. The cante bubbles forth perhaps paying
tribute to the great guitarist Juan Carlos Romero whose playing
is sweet and natural and has good compás. Carmen bravely
breaks her voice. She measures the lines, plays with her voice
putting it to the test with deep and high sounds. She traipses
through the musical staff with unexpected changes when you
least expect them.

A
voice and a guitar. The accompaniment is superfluous when
she gets into tarantas. The guitar plays the deep notes, hypnotizing
and clean. The singer searches. The wailing tones overcome
her and the audience seems to be holding its breath, as if
to give her air so as to relieve her lament. The guitar is
intimate, four thousand tones embrace it and calm it. Carmen’s
angst is touching and unsettling, anguished, direct to the
soul.

The counterpoint compás of tientos. The percussion
and guitars “invent” a different rhythm, re-creating
the form in which the woman from Linares doesn’t move
too far away from the orthodox forms, yet modern, respectful.
The change afterwards to tangos is a delight.

Deep in her cantes there are modern undercurrents which
adapt to the times showing that there are still things to
be discovered and it’s possible to do a new kind of
flamenco, different from that which came before, and which
does not limit Carmen Linares. The truth is, there is only
one “flamenco”.

Unusual bulerías por soleá. Once again she
surprises and delights. She strives to get into herself and
find things no one knows. It’s a constant challenge,
a struggle to enjoy the art. It was as if they were doing
it for themselves, daring at every turn.

Then the seguiriya. It grabs, it’s brave…she dares
to interpret an unusual cante, admirable, out of the ordinary.
She doesn’t overextend or press her luck with too much
novelty in this complex cante that she complicates even more.
Her voice is contained and emotional, ending with Silverio’s
cabales which gives way to bulerías.

There aren’t enough compliments to describe the finesse
and elegance ‘por fiesta’. Olé, toma que
toma! There’s more to bulerías than Jerez-style,
although she hints at this when she wants.

After an enormous ovation she has to return to the stage
where she had never sung before to put the rich icing on the
cake with a version of Alberti’s “Se equivocó
la paloma”. “Bieenn!” was the audience’s
last word.