3 POETS

THE RECORDING

THE DISC

VENUES

Three Poets at the Circle

Three Poets: a musical voyage through the verses of this most poetic twentieth century trinity: Lorca, Cunqueiro and García Clavo, with piano, accordion, guitar and cello. Lorca for the passion, Cunqueiro for the tenderness and García Calvo for the black flower of thought.

Three poets: three tributaries flowing into the same poetic river, which can be traced back to the sung canticles of love and friendship of those first Gallician-Portuguese troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which passes through St. John and St.Theresa, through Quevedo and both Machados, and nourishes our dreams and by now forms a very part of ourselves.

Three poets who led me to make a handful of songs, brought together on three records, from which we offer a selection in this recital of sonnets and gazelles, ladies and gentlemen, and songs and solliloquoys, bringing in the piano once more and, with it, songs that I had not forgotten about.

Three poets, three in one, the one thinking of the other, who is you: because "I do not say my song, but rather who goes with me".

This is the first record that I have recorded live. I have always thought that the feelings, the emotion and the fervour which are sometimes to be found in a recital, in that meeting between audience and player, as they share the same moment in time and space, were impossible to reach in a recording studio, however many technicians were at work.

So, between the 6th and the 11th of May 1998 we recorded three of the six concerts which we gave at the Círculo de Bellas Artes; we chose the best performances and we edited the record as it stood, without taking away or adding nary a breath nor a quaver. The applause proved a problem, since we couldn´t leave it as it was in its entirety, but it wouldn´t have been natural to get rid of it altogether, since it is part of the atmosphere, so we decided to cut it back to a token measure. I sometimes remembered that poem by Celaya which made me so emotional when I heard Paco Ibáñez sing it: "A poem is not thought drop by drop, it is not a beautiful product, it is not a perfect fruit; it is what is most necessary, that which has no name: in heaven it is cries and on earth it is actions".

Whatever the case, I trust that we have known somehow how to catch, and give expression to on this record, the emotion felt on that stage of the Circle thanks to the warm and silent presence of our audience. People often dwell on the sensitivity of the artist, of the creator, of the performer, but none of this would be of any use without a spectator capable of appreciating it, given that eloquence, as Antonio Machado said, lies as much in the person who speaks as in the person who listens.

I must add that it has been a great stroke of luck to be able to sing to the accompaniment of such musicians as Pedro Navarrete on the piano, Rafael Domínguez on the cello and Cuco Pérez on the accordion.