Paco Peña is one of the world’s greatest flamenco guitarists. As a composer, he is one of a growing number of prominent creatives who believe that music is a powerful medium that can be harnessed to lobby for social change. Musical advocacy is becoming an international trend.
Australian composer Ross Edwards’ Vespers for Mother Earth, first performed this year, was written as a response to our ecological crisis. Similarly, John Adams’ trilogy Become River is an exploration of this American conductor and composer’s profound connection to nature and the world’s changing climate.
Peña’s Requiem for the Earth celebrates the world’s glories with a fierce flamenco physicality and joyful explosions of sound, yet it’s also a gritty wake-up call. A profound mosaic of influences and colours, light and dark, the message behind this epic lament is to stop destroying Earth’s ecological health.
First performed in 2004, Peña fused the structure of a requiem mass with flamenco lyricism and pacey offbeat rhythm. The outcome is powerful, a visceral paeon to hope and redemption in which Latin incantation alternates with the Spanish language. Lyrics relating to the environment are derived from Peter Bunyard’s ideas and text.
Peña, 82, who plays in Brisbane in September as part of Brisbane Festival, is also a guest of the Adelaide Guitar Festival. He has significantly championed Southern Spain’s musical heritage. He founded both the world’s first university course on flamenco guitar at the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music and the annual Cordoba Guitar Festival.
Does he think flamenco is taken seriously these days?
“Very much so,” says Peña on the phone from London. “I’ve seen fantastic developments in my lifetime because it’s exotic and yet familiar to musicians and audiences around the world.”
Along with Misa Flamenca (a flamenco mass) first performed in 1991, Requiem for the Earth is one of this legendary Andalusian’s most iconic compositions. Each work has received global acclaim. Peña explains why he wrote the requiem:
“I was on my way to Australia and at one of the airports when Howard Moody, the former director of the UK’s Salisbury choir, who collaborated with me in performing Misa Flamenca, asked me to write another choral work,” he explains.
“I half-heartedly agreed but when I discovered the theme for the 2004 Salisbury Festival was In Praise of Earth, it was a happy coincidence because I’m very concerned about what we are doing to the planet.”
Is there an environmental issue especially close to his heart?
“I come from Cordoba in Spain,” he says. “A hot place. I’ve always been very protective of water. In many places around the world we can just open a can. But I remember having to fetch water from a well and a fountain near my house which supplied just enough for 10 families. It hurts me deeply when water is wasted.”
An intense solo guitar interlude performed by Peña with picado – rapidly alternated index and middle fingers – and rasgueado (strumming) introduces the performance and establishes the work’s Spanish origins.
Australian audiences can expect sparks to fly with phenomenal guitarists, four solo singers and percussion drawing on rhythmically complex handclaps, guitar taps, djembe (hand drum) and cajon (box percussion). These forces will be boosted at Brisbane’s QPAC by the Queensland-based adult choir Resonance of Birralee and Voices of Birralee, an award-winning children’s choral ensemble. In Adelaide, the Young Adelaide Voices and Rising Voices will perform in the Requiem.
Why does Peña engage a children’s choir when the challenge of merging swathes of choral music with taxing and heavily accented Andalusian rhythm is so immense?
“Because children are environmentally aware and the future belongs to them,” he says. “They will be most affected by the damage we have caused. It’s such a poignant moment when the young choristers sing out: “Foolish mankind. What have you done to the earth?”
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Ironically a requiem is a work to commemorate the dead but Peña’s optimism and belief that the earth is alive and there’s still time to save it shines through.
Requiem for the Earth will be presented at QPAC Concert Hall in Brisbane on September 9 and Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide on September 12.
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