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09
Thu
May
2018
20:00 |
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$420, $350, $280, $200 |
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Concert Hall, Hong Kong City Hall |
BUY TICKET
Music
Encore Series: Paco Peña and Friends – Esencias
Due to overwhelming response, there are 12 tickets of box seats and 10 tickets of promenade seats with restricted view ($200 for each ticket) available for sale at the URBTIX Box Office of Hong Kong City Hall from 10am on the day of the concert. Each person can purchase a maximum of two tickets per transaction on a first-come-first-served basis.
Paco Peña and Flamenco (Keith Anderson)
The Spanish maestro Paco Peña has played a leading role in the popularisation and wide acceptance of Flamenco during the last 50 years. Born in the Andalusian city of Córdoba, Spain, he began to play the guitar as a child, at a time when Flamenco had no place as a serious and respectable art form, a status it was to achieve in part through his life-long activities. The autonomous community of Andalusia is the most southern part of Spain, of which Córdoba is a province, in its long history has welcomed people of many other cultures, Greeks, Phoenicians, Moors, Jews and Gypsies. A Carthaginian then a Roman settlement, Córdoba became a Muslim Emirate and then a Caliphate, a centre which allowed Jews, Christians and Moors to make their own contributions to culture. With the Reconquest in 1236 by the Christian forces of Castile, this cultural amalgam was weakened, particularly with the expulsion of Jews and unconverted Moslems in the 1490s. Nevertheless much of this mixed cultural heritage persists and is reflected in the art of Flamenco.
The etymological origin of the word is disputed. Flamenco includes song, guitar, dance, vocalisations and clapping and finger-snapping, and has developed its own characteristic musical language. This has elevated flamenco to an art form, a subject of serious study and much more than the tourist entertainment it once seemed fated to be. In his long career Paco Peña has made an important contribution to the art of flamenco, particularly after his move to London in 1966. It was here that, after contributing to popular entertainment, he broke new ground with a Flamenco recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank, soon followed by a degree of acceptance at home, when he gave a Flamenco recital at the Córdoba Conservatory.
Paco Peña' s achievement in Flamenco lies not only in his performance as a Flamenco guitarist but in the establishment of wider musical explorations of the art in events that include not only song, dance, formal gesture and guitar, but also introduce an element of the spoken word, notably in his incorporation of lines from the great Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, an early victim of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the inclusion of film, exemplified in his Patrias, a multi-media creation.
Notably Paco Peña has extended and expanded the art of Flamenco guitar from its original role as an accompaniment to dance and song, to an instrumental form in its own right and the centre of multi-media creations. With his own company he has been able to provide a full display of formal dance and song, but also a characteristic development of solo and guitar ensemble repertoire, partly influenced by the great classical guitarists of Spain. To this Paco Peña has added a dramatic element, the whole creation epitomising the music and spirit of Spain.
After Patrias Paco Peña has taken a different course, he returns to explore the possibilities of the guitar in relation to Flamenco. This is realised in Esencias , a project essentially brought to Hong Kong in an unmissable concert, the essence of flamenco and of the art of its most distinguished champion, Paco Peña.
TICKETING
DATE VENUE PRICE 09.05.2018 (Wed)
20:00
20:00
Concert Hall, Hong Kong City Hall
$420, $350, $280, $200