As the world's first professor of flamenco guitar, Paco Peña knows as much as anybody about the origins and development of flamenco. Happily, though, he doesn't let scholarship gum up the works of a dazzling live performance.
As he points out, flamenco is a developing form, subject to spontaneous reinvention. The trick is to assemble the right performers for the job. And if there's anything missing from the repertoire of Peña's Flamenco Dance Company, it probably doesn't exist.
The performance builds methodically from Peña playing solo, motionless in the spotlight with his guitar, through passages featuring two and three guitarists to the company's full complement, including male and female singers, dancers and percussionist. The approach is to contrast a rotating cast of soloists with the insistent but always shifting rhythmic patterns of the ensemble, the latter built from a latticework of crosshatched guitars and Nacho Lopez's percussion, plus the relentless clatter of syncopated handclaps.
Thus, Fernando Romero, Alicia Marquez and Charo Espino take a spin through Explorando el Fandango while the company's singers urge them to feats of ever-faster footwork. Cadiz is a solo spot for Marquez, while Sevilla ends the first half in a whirl of Espino's black-and-white polka-dot frock and the blur of Angel Muñoz's gyrating heels.
In the middle of all this it could be possible to overlook Peña's brilliance on guitar, so he wisely helps himself to some eloquent solo passages in the second half. Though he's a master of the driving blood-on-the-sand drama of flamenco, he also has a fine lyrical touch and a penchant for a kind of baroque impressionism, alongside his knack of producing far more notes than one pair of hands would seem capable of playing.
Then the company comes roaring back, the women suddenly dramatically dressed in red, the men circling them like matadors. In Peña's band everybody gets a go, like it or not, and the evening ends with a couple of comedy dance routines from the usually static singers and dancers. It's as if they're reassuring us that it's not all lust, vengeance and murder.
