Writer and Performer: Argentina
Flamenco musicians are often revered in their own right, so Sadler’s Wells annual Flamenco Festivals always include a strand of concert performances in the Lilian Baylis Studio, an intimate venue usually reserved for experimental dance work, but during this fortnight given over to small solo and accompanied concerts from some of the genre’s leading artists. In a double bill of performances taking place across a single evening, Argentina: Flamenco by Cantaora centres on an outstanding vocal if very little contextual information.
Argentina is a magnificent musician, a flamenco performer of outstanding range and quality whose voice fills the studio space with the emotional resonance, swooping range and unmatched breath control across ten songs and an encore. There is almost an operatic scale to Argentina’s vocal, able to sustain notes for aeons of time, all the while changing the tone, pitch and undulation to add layers of meaning to her technically accomplished approach. An emotive singer who conveys the sorrowful depths, felt intensity and building pressure of her songs, Argentina embodies the imploring narratives across the show.
Supporting Argentina on guitar, the only instrument on stage besides Argentina’s powerful range, the guitarist Jesús Guerrero sets the pace and pitch of the numbers, sometimes offering lighter, twinklier rhythms as his fingers crush quickly across the strings, while in the weightier numbers, the heavy twang of the strings becomes a defining feature, picking at the instrument as the intensity increases. Working in full collaboration with Argentina, Guerrero looks with awe at his star’s abilities as she frequently claps the flamenco beat alongside him, also making full use of the solo moments that often open the songs to display his own technique to the crowd.
The music aside, however, and this is a performance with almost no interaction with the audience and a degree of assumption about who is watching. Admitting her English is “very bad,” Argentina addresses the audience only once and understandably in Spanish, and while most of those present understand, it’s not clear that everyone does. The festival is an opportunity to engage beyond traditional communities, to see work you would not ordinarily find, but also to win new audiences for the venue, so it is a shame that there isn’t an opportunity for translation to support the performance and audience to meet in the music.
This extends to the song choices and the sparsity of information provided about what Argentina actually sings. It is a question that hangs over every concert in any language – why these songs in this order in this moment, and what do they mean to the singer? The show synopsis speaks of cartagenera, granaína and petenera, but away from the dance form, this music is important to Argentina; we hear how much it means in her glorious voice, we just need her to tell us her flamenco story as well.
Reviewed on 5 June 2025
