‘Concierto de Aranjuez,’ the musical milestone by Paco de Lucía that nobody wanted to finance

On April 24, 1991, Paco de Lucía was 44 years old and already had 24 albums under his belt, not counting the nine he had recorded in tandem with the flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla. His last solo album at that point was Siroco (1987), where he took on nine compositions that confirmed him as one of the best Spanish musicians of the 20th century. But on that April night, at the Bulevar theater in Torrelodones, near Madrid, Paco de Lucía was not alone.

On stage, he was accompanied by the Cadaqués Orchestra conducted by Edmon Colomer; standing outside the theatre door were dozens of people who had been unable to purchase a ticket, and the inside was packed with 800 spectators who were asked to remain completely silent in order to record an album that would become a milestone in music history. To add to the stress, the maestro Joaquín Rodrigo, 90 years old at the time, was sitting in the front row to hear what a flamenco artist had done with his most famous work of all: the Concierto de Aranjuez, composed in 1939.

Why was that 1991 recital held in a nondescript concert hall in Torrelodones, a municipality located 29 km (18 miles) northwest of Madrid, despite the fact that Paco De Lucía would have preferred the much more prestigious Teatro Real or Teatro de La Zarzuela, both in the heart of the Spanish capital? The answer is not as obvious as the question. Especially if one takes into account that Paco de Lucía was already Spain’s best and most international guitarist. “It was held in Torrelodones because it was cheaper,” says Manolo Nieto, a member of La Banda del Tío Pringue, as the guitarist named the tiny and discreet circle of friends he formed in 1967 and kept until his death a decade ago.

The last tribute of 2024 on the occasion of that anniversary will take place this coming Saturday: a concert that will bring together some of the artists who once accompanied the virtuoso guitarist: Niño Josele (director of the 1991 festival), Jorge Pardo, Juan Manuel Cañizares, Rubem Dantas and Duquende, among others. Also until Saturday, a photo exhibition featuring the work of photographer Paco Manzano is being exhibited at the Casa de la Cultura. “I don’t remember Paco de Lucía being nervous, but he was very focused, so much so that he didn’t realize that I took a photo of him smoking while standing less than a meter away from him and using a flash,” recalls the author of the four photos of that night that illustrate this story, and three of which had never been published before.

The origin

When exactly Paco de Lucía began to imagine this album is something that none of the interviewees can pinpoint precisely, but Niño Josele sees it as a natural turn of events: “I always had the impression that Rodrigo had composed it thinking of a guitarist who would play it in the future. And that someone was Paco.”

But when and why did he get into this mess? Nieto answers: “The idea had been on his mind for years, but it was his then wife, Casilda Varela, who helped him find the right person.” The friend is referring to guitarist José María Gallardo del Rey, whom Paco de Lucía met at the home of a friend of the couple. In this way, because of his knowledge of classical guitar playing, Gallardo became, at 25 years of age, a master to the master. “He [De Lucía] learned things in 15 seconds flat, he was like a predator,” recalls Gallardo.

Gallardo explains that Paco de Lucía developed calluses between the nail and the tip of his right-hand fingers. “It is unusual, because guitarists usually get them on the left hand from pressing the strings on the fretboard, which shows that his technique was so different that he ended up getting injured,” explains the man who had to act as an orchestra conductor when Paco de Lucía first played Concierto de Aranjuez. It was in Japan, with the Telemann Orchestra of Osaka in May 1990, and Gallardo was picked to lead it because he was the perfect “translator” by dint of his own work lying somewhere between flamenco and classical music.

The shortcomings

Aware of his own limitations, De Lucía sought help from Gallardo and from many others. Later he would receive help from other guitarists such as Cañizares and De Lucía’s own nephew, José María Bandera. But although he knew his shortcomings, there was an internal drive that pushed him to press on with the challenge: the contempt that classical music had shown towards flamenco. The famed classical guitarist Andrés Segovia had once defined flamenco as “that music that is played in taverns.” Beyond these malicious or unfortunate statements, there are data that confirm this wide-held contempt: the first Chair of Flamenco Guitar in the world was not established in Spain, but at the Rotterdam Conservatory in The Netherlands. That was in 1976, a few months after Paco de Lucía had played at the Teatro Real in Madrid, generating a media stir and something like fear among many classical musicians.

He had an almost superhuman ability to memorize just by seeing or hearing something once. In the end, I felt like I was the one receiving a lesson

Japanese guitar master Shin-ichi Fukuda

The learning process continued. He then traveled to Japan, where he met up with the classical guitar master Shin-ichi Fukuda. “Neither Paco spoke Japanese, nor Fukuda Spanish, and barely any English. To make matters worse,” explains Manolo Nieto, “my friend Paco had no idea how to read a music score.” For this reason, the language they used was different, and this is how the Japanese musician recalled it in a conversation with this newspaper (and thanks to interpretation by Mariko Ogura): “The first conversation consisted of exchanging guitars: He let me play his Hermanos Conde and I let him play my Ignacio Fleta.” A few minutes later, De Lucía asked Fukuda if he knew how to play the Concierto de Aranjuez.

And so began another key collaboration for the project, as the Japanese musician remembers that Paco de Lucía recorded him with two video cameras with which he recorded the Japanese musician’s right hand and left hand. “He recorded me showing him different ways of playing the same scale, explaining possible solutions. He asked me about reading sheet music, rhythmic structures and fingerings. All his questions were precise, and his musical instinct was prodigious. He had an almost superhuman ability to memorize just by seeing or hearing something once. In the end, I felt like I was the one receiving a lesson.”

With all this information, Paco de Lucía locked himself up in his house in the Caribbean and rehearsed until he was exhausted.

The concert

The album was still without funding when Paco de Lucía tried to record Concierto de Aranjuez for the first time at the Pleyel Concert Hall in Paris in February 1991. Polygram, his record company, claimed that in addition to being expensive, their classical label, Deutsche Grammophon, already had many recordings of the Concierto de Aranjuez. What they failed to understand was that this was the first time that a flamenco artist was undertaking Rodrigo’s classic composition. A flamenco artist who was none other than Paco de Lucía.

The Torrelodones concert was only made possible through a grant from the Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, a public agency created by the government of Felipe González to organize the celebrations of the so-called discovery of America and the Expo 1992 in Seville. It was also through this grant that the project added names such as John Kurlander, a sound designer who years later was in charge of films such as The Lord of the Rings, and who brought in a mobile BBC unit from London to deal with what was going to be a very complicated recording. “Absolute silence was requested from the audience because the concert was going to be recorded live. Even my photo camera was a problem because it was analogue and it made too much noise,” explains Nieto, who remembers his friend as “uneasily calm.”

The recital began with Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, and then Paco de Lucía, the only performer without music sheet on stage, came on and let himself be rocked by the Cadaqués Orchestra. At the end, the three pieces from Isaac Albéniz’s Iberia Suite arranged by Cañizares were not played, and were added later to the recording so that the album would be of the appropriate length for the commercial standards of the time. The reason? Once again, lack of budget.

At the end, the maestro Rodrigo came on stage and asked De Lucía to play the entire second movement, the famous Adagio, once again. “I think about it and it scares me,” says Niño Josele, “playing someone else’s work, the work of a renowned maestro. He made it so personal, so his own… But I have no doubt that he passed the test.”

The result

Rodrigo did indeed bless Paco de Lucía. Not by giving a resounding yes or no, but by uttering a phrase that came out sounding more flamenco than classical: “I had never heard my Concierto de Aranjuez performed so erotically and with such inspired fire.”

Cañizares, who was 22 at the time, provides a more technical explanation: “Paco gave that concert a rhythm that it had never had before, because where classical musicians defended the clean note, he looked for the rhythm.” Josemi Carmona, a guitarist and the youngest member of the Spanish flamenco fusion band Ketama, was 20 years old. “It was very exciting. It was beautiful, he gave it the rage of flamenco and the sweetness of classical music. Paco was happy after the concert, but he told us several times how difficult it had been to get it all together, to play it, to learn it,” he explains. Carmona and the other members of his band show up in one of the photos in this article, along with Latin jazz pianist Michel Camilo. Also captured by Manzano’s camera that night were Tomatito and Pepe Habichuela, famous flamenco guitarists in their own right who came to the concert.

It is no coincidence that there were so many guitarists present: it was they whom Paco de Lucía did not want to disappoint. That is why he said the following at the end of the performance: “This has gone well, but it is not a success for me. This is good for the world that I defend.” That is, he was aware that he was opening up a path of no return for his fellow flamenco artists.

The legacy

Five years later, it was Cañizares himself who recorded the same concert at the request of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattel. “When I told Paco, he was delighted and told me to go ahead, that I was more than ready.” Three decades after that concert in Torrelodones, Tomatito did the same, and in the meantime, unthinkable paths opened up for a flamenco artist within classical music. The most ambitious case was that of Enrique Morente in 1996, who went a step further, recording from scratch and with a lot of help an album with two classical works: Alegro Soleá and Fantasía del Cante Jondo. And like Paco de Lucía, without knowing how to read a score.

Paco de Lucía’s efforts are celebrated today by fans of “classical and flamenco music alike,” as Bandera likes to point out. An effort that had to be recorded because, as the protagonist of this story used to say, “concerts are blown away by the wind.” But as Gallardo del Rey remembers, that time made more sense than others. Because if his record company didn’t see the value of what he was proposing, orchestras around the world did. “As soon as they heard what he did, they offered him the best theatres and orchestra conductors to tour his Concierto de Aranjuez, but he never played that concert live again and I never heard him talk about it again,” says Gallardo.

The reason? “He never said it like that, but I dare to say it because I experienced it. Paco never felt free playing music that was not his own, and I can attest to the fact that he had a very bad time when faced with a language and a work that were not his. But it was a challenge that went beyond him.”

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