MUSIC REVIEW : Guitarist Paco de Lucia Elevates Flamenco to an Art Form

When Paco de Lucia walked onto the revolving stage in Celebrity Theatre, he was greeted by cries of ‘!Paco, ole!” and a spontaneous standing ovation.

And before the audience could catch its breath, the 46-year-old flamenco guitarist was mesmerizing them with a solo improvisation as notable for its cool, sexy lyricism as its fast finger work. While musicians around the world scramble to reach additional audiences by crossing over, Lucia does so by transcending the one into which he was born.

Saturday night, he and the sextet with which he is now touring (brother Pepe de Lucia and Ramon de Algeciras, Ruben Dantas, Jorge Pardo, Carlos Benavent and Manuel Soler) proved that exploring flamenco as if it were a serious art form can provide results as deeply heartfelt as they are superficially entertaining.

The purely entertainment values were always obvious, whether it was Lucia’s colorful flourishes, Pepe de Lucia’s anguished vocalizing, Soler’s high-kicking dancing, or Pardo’s eloquent flute-playing.

What made the 2 1/2 hours of improvisations so musically substantial was the variety with which Paco de Lucia blended the overtly virtuosic with the dreamily introspective, how fully he used the entire resources of the sextet, and how relatively short and compact he seemed to keep each new creation.

Perhaps the most brilliant example of these came after intermission when they slowly built up a universe of softly seductive chords and rhythms into which each of the other players chained until the music reached a fever pitch and the audience was hoarse from cheering.

Lucia, however, who physically is beginning to resemble a mature lion more than a young one, refused to milk the audience more than was musically appropriate and, at the end and together with the sextet, played only one, ultimately low-key encore.