Last night I saw a unique Flamenco concert in Granada. A fusion of Sefardi music, flamenco and Lorca poetry. The event was inside the patio of the Museum Palacio de los Olvidados. just along Carrera del Darro by Plaza Nueva. This building opened on Jan 2nd 2014 as a Sephardic centre. They offer different activities surrounding the history of the city of Granada.
I wrote a post about the Museum itself here>Palace of the Forgotten
This Summer 2014 they are offering Flamenco concerts each night at 8.30 and 10.30pm. (except Sundays). You can buy the tickets online or at the Museum entrance desk.
It is generally believed that Flamenco music originated from both Jewish and Arab cultures. The sounds of Flamenco music and Sefardi songs are similar. This concert is set inside the inner patio of the Palacio de San Ines and only seats around 35 people. So the experience is intense and close up.
Tickets cost 20 euros and include a drink and typical sweet biscuit at the end of the show
Flamenco Granada July 2014
The poem which inspired this concert is by Granada poet Federico García Lorca
Thamar + Amnon
Here is the english translation of this romance poem:
The moon turns in the sky
over lands without water
while the summer sows
murmurs of tiger and flame.
Over the roofs
metal nerves jangled.
Rippling air stirred
with woolly bleatings.
The earth offered itself
full of scarred wounds,
or shuddering with the fierce
searings of white light.
Thamar was dreaming
of birds in her throat
to the sound of cold tambourines
and moonlit zithers.
Her nakedness in the eaves,
the sharp north of a palm-tree,
demands snowflakes on her belly,
and hailstones on her shoulders.
Thamar was singing
naked on the terrace.
Around her feet
five frozen pigeons.
Amnon, slim, precise,
watched her from the tower,
with thighs of foam,
and quivering beard.
Her bright nakedness
was stretched out on the terrace
with the murmur in her teeth
of a newly struck arrow.
Amnon was gazing
at the low, round moon,
and in the moon he saw
his sister’s hard breasts.
Amnon lay on his bed
at half past three.
The whole room suffered
from his eyes filled with wings.
The solid light buries
villages in brown sand,
or reveals the ephemeral
coral of roses and dahlias.
Pure captive well-water
gushes silence into jars.
The cobra stretches, sings
in the moss of tree-trunks.
Amnon moans among
the coolness of bed-sheets.
The ivy of a shiver
clothes his burning flesh.
Thamar enters silently
through the room’s silence,
the colour of vein and Danube,
troubled by distant footprints.
‘Thamar, erase my vision
with your certain dawn.
The threads of my blood weave
frills on your skirt.’
‘Let me be, brother,
Your kisses on my shoulder
are wasps and little breezes
in a double swarm of flutes.’
‘Thamar, you have in your high breasts
two fishes that call to me,
and in your fingertips
the murmur of a captive rose.’
The king’s hundred horses
neighed in the courtyard.
The slenderness of the vine
resisted buckets of sunlight.
Now he grasps her by the hair,
now he tears her under-things.
Warm corals drawing streams
on a light-coloured map.
Oh, what cries were heard
above the houses!
What a thicket of knives
and torn tunics.
Slaves go up and down
the saddened stairs.
Thighs and pistons play
under stationary clouds.
Gypsy virgins scream
around Thamar,
others gather drops
from her martyred flower.
White cloths redden
in the closed rooms.
Murmurs of warm daybreak
changing vines and fishes.
Amnon, angry violator,
flees on his pony.
Negroes loose arrows at him
from the walls and towers.
And when the four hooves
become four echoes,
King David cuts his harp-strings
with a pair of scissors.
Flamenco Granada
Summer concerts in July 2014 at Palacio de los Olvidados, Cuesta San Ines, Granada, Spain.
