This
version, recorded live for a TV (TVE) special, is the one currently available. The first recording of the SONETOS, from 1986 and released only on vynil, wasn´t resealed on CD.
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AMANCIO PRADA, vocals
AGUSTÍN SERRANO, piano
PEDRO ITURRALDE, sax
CARLOS CARLI, percussion
BRUNO VIDAL, bass
Photography, Bernardo Pérez
Grafic Desing, Alberto Corazón
Sound Technician, Juan Vinader
Recorded Eurosonic, Madrid,
May, 1987
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This light, this fire which devours me. / This grey landscape that
surrounds me. / All this pain for one sole idea. / This anguish of sky, world and time.
First sonnet of dark love, which is really a sonnet about absence of love. Love is a
bitter science. The music and the voice of Amancio Prada, turned against themselves,
sad/Leonese, green/Galician, are able to express, in loud screams, what the posthumous
poet expressed/exhumed in silence. Only Amancio Prada could sing the late Federico of the
dark love. Because Amancio Prada is a singer of finalities, a singer of the "wretched
times" of the heart, of those times in which there is almost no time to live or die.
I am in fear of losing the marvel of your eyes of a statue...The poet is fearful, his love
has the eyes of a statue (distant eyes, no/eyes). The poet in all of these sonnets appears
in the guise of a sentimental servant, trunk without leaves, worm of suffering, Cross and
wet pain, dog of your domain. Lorca´s last grandiose book is a book about submission to a
desire. Lorca was – in opposition to the perceived image of happiness – a
professional sufferer...
The voice of Amancio Prada, punished by centuries, lyric of humbleness, is well suited for
expressing such a submission. He is like a young lay erudite man singing to a pagan God
and to a feeling which cannot be confessed. Amancio Prada adds a legendary pain to the
hugely concrete/actual pain of Lorca, in this way, enlarging and exalting it...If I live
without myself, I want to lose you. Here the mystic Lorca sounds like Saint Teresa in
love. Always the complicity between sex and mysticism. Saint John of the Cross? Amancio
Prada has a voice clasped to suffering. A voice which expresses all the meaning of the
late Lorca. One does not know whether one should recite lyrical poetry, but, in any case,
one should recite it like Amancio Prada, a professional sufferer, a subtle professional of
pain who has found for these verses the most transparent (the most non-existent) music and
intonation. It is as if Lorca and Prada had both arrived, from different directions, at
one and the same feeling, at one and the same thought about the feeling of love.
We have been privy to, much more than mere recital, a magical combination of
sensibilities. Lorca, here, does not write sonnets in the style of Gongora or Lope.
Instead, he tears up the traditional formula, littering with lyrical corpses the interior
of the teaching. The whole of Lorca´s book is lament and distance. The whole of Prada´s
recital: a drawing near and an assonance. Lorca´s love, insofar as it is unrequited or
requited frivolously, finds sublimation in the dark love. The rain-laden voice of Amancio
Prada, provides the exact climate for these particular pains of lost love. And also for
others.
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Francisco Umbral |
