original release
.jpg)
cd realease as paco ibáñez 2 [2002]
album rating: ★★★★☆
Genre: Canción de autor / Spanish poetry set to music / chanson. Paco Ibáñez / 2 — also known in its original French edition as La poésie espagnole de nos jours et de toujours ('Spanish Poetry of Today and Always') — is the second album by Paco Ibáñez (born Valencia, 1934), released by Polydor in 1967 (later reissued as Polydor/Moshé-Naïm). Ibáñez is one of the most significant and original figures in the tradition of sung poetry in the Spanish language: a guitar player, singer and arranger who has dedicated his career to setting to music the work of poets, classical and contemporary, from the Spanish literary tradition. His father was a Valencian cabinetmaker with anarchist sympathies; the family was exiled to France following the Spanish Civil War. Growing up in Paris, Ibáñez came into contact with the chanson tradition — particularly Georges Brassens, whom he considers his master — and with the Spanish poets he had begun reading in exile. His first album (1964, illustrated by Salvador Dalí) set poems by Federico García Lorca and Luis de Góngora; it became an immediate classic, used by teachers of Spanish literature and by defenders of civil liberties as a symbol of cultural resistance. Paco Ibáñez / 2 deepens and broadens the project: the twelve tracks set poems by Gabriel Celaya, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti, Blas de Otero, Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora — ranging from contemporaries of the mid-twentieth century writing under or against the Franco dictatorship to Golden Age masters of the 16th and 17th centuries. The album was illustrated by José Ortega. It opens with Gabriel Celaya's 'La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro' ('Poetry is a weapon loaded with the future') — one of the great poems of Spanish 20th-century political verse — and continues with Miguel Hernández's 'Andaluces de Jaén', Rafael Alberti's 'Balada del que nunca fue a Granada' (an elegy to Lorca written in Argentine exile in 1953), Blas de Otero's 'Me llamarán, nos llamarán' (a poem facing a firing squad) and 'Me queda la palabra', Celaya's 'España en marcha', and a second side devoted to Golden Age verse: Quevedo's 'Don Dinero' and 'Romance satírico', Góngora's 'Déjame en paz amor tirano' and 'Verdad, mentira', the anonymous Moorish romance 'La gran pérdida de Alhama', and Quevedo's 'Es amarga la verdad.' Ibáñez arranged all the music himself for solo guitar and voice, with absolute economy of means.
Label: Polydor (France/Spain), 1967. Also issued as Moshé-Naïm. Illustrated by José Ortega.
Producer: Not individually credited. All music arranged by Paco Ibáñez for guitar and voice.
Recording studio: Not individually specified in publicly available sources; recorded in France.
Critical reception: Paco Ibáñez / 2 is regarded as one of the masterworks of Spanish canción de autor and of poetry set to music in any language. The La Fonoteca review describes it as 'un gran disco, en fin, sin artificios, con una envoltura musical humilde y desprovista de todo artificio con una voz grave y potente, una voz de pregonero de verdades y llamadas a la reflexión, a la toma de conciencia y, en última instancia, al combate' ('a great record, ultimately, without artifice, with a humble musical setting stripped of all ornament, with a deep and powerful voice, a voice proclaiming truths and calls to reflection, to awareness and, ultimately, to struggle'). The Human Traces essay on Ibáñez describes him as creating 'an absolutely unique style, with absolute instrumental simplicity and a profound emotivity and intensity in his vocal interpretation.'
Commercial success: Paco Ibáñez / 2 was a significant success in France and among Spanish speakers in exile and in Spain, where the album circulated clandestinely under the Franco dictatorship and its songs became anthems of resistance. In 1967 Ibáñez visited Spain for the first time to give recitals in Madrid and Barcelona; in 1969 his interpretation of Rafael Alberti's 'A galopar' made him 'a symbol of the struggle against the Franco dictatorship' (Internet Archive biography). That same year he triumphed at the Paris Olympia. His recordings in this period became foundational texts of the Spanish anti-Francoist cultural resistance and continue to be used by teachers of Spanish literature worldwide.
text generated by artificial intelligence — claude, sonnet 4.6 — free version, liable to contain errors