Pling! And again. And again. Pliiing ?! - It's amazing how you can dig your way into the sound of a lonely bell, which is tuned to only one note. But it is like with the piano: The attack makes the music, changes the spread in space and the color values. What Pedro Estevan knows, of course, and that's why he's always tried it out with the sound engineers - in the recut of a recording session that has lasted all day and now demands concentration one last time before one of the guest gardens calls for a nightcap that here, in in the old town of Seville, also served outdoors in winter: no longer “Pling”, but “¡Salud!”.
Alongside Jordi Savall, the whale-bearded Estevan is the second patriarch of the Spanish old music scene;
these days he was seventy.
The percussionist has often played in the various Savall ensembles, but currently he has swarmed to the capital of Andalusia and the "Accademia del Piacere", which is located there.
If you asked him why he was doing this to himself on this striking anniversary, the quietly delighted jubilee could, for example, refer to the gently enchanted magic of the location.
It's not a functionally technologically advanced studio, but an old Franciscan monastery church, outwardly completely inconspicuous and far from the tourist streams in the backyard of one of the old town quarters, but not without a mysterious life of its own.
Fusion of secular and religious tones
The Moorish-inspired tiles in the base zone as well as the cheerfully rising angelic dance on the ceiling, a winged crowd of Cupids in the service of the Ecclesia Catholica, are gently chewed by the ravages of time, but precisely because of this they have a melancholy, cheerful solemnity in which one likes to talk about the past how to think about the future. Also perfectly fitting to the music of the program recorded here (and already successfully presented to the public the previous evening), in which secular, sensual tones are found alongside intimate religious raptures - where Estevan's bells then exactly the interface between violent earthly love pains and the heavenly consolation of the Marian hymn "Ave Maris Stella ”.
He could also refer to the ensemble name for his happy fron around the birthday, because the Italian "Piacere" means that holistic joy of being, in which subtle spiritual delights and solid sensuality are not mutually exclusive, but seek each other - and even hard work for pleasure can be.