Música en Los Jardines del Real Alcázar

I enter the gates of the gardens of the Alcázar, resigned to the bothers of open-air concerts--mosquitoes, heat, traffic noise. My list is long and personal.

Inside, I feel a manton of peace settle around me. Tranquilo, as C says at the house. The gardens work their magic.

Música Prima takes the stage, and the city melts away. There is only this--clear sky, cooling winds swaying the sky-sweeping palm trees, and music from the Middle Ages.



It is the International Year of Reconciliation. Period instruments weave a fabric of music--Christian, Sephardic Jew and Islamic--distinct but nuanced by years of intwined existence. Strings and percussion carry the notes with familiar shapes and sounds; wind intrigues with mechanical rarities, organetto, a portable pipe organ, and zanfoña, a hurdy-gurdy.

Literal meaning takes shape as familiar words emerge here and there in explanation and lyric. It is the music itself, though, that transcends spoken word, a way of knowing through the centuries.

The church bell, when it finally tolls, loses it metallic harshness and drifts into the soft night air, an anonymous fourth to the group´s trio.

Cloudy, With No Chance of Rain

For an hour or six this morning, Sevilla´s empty blue sky greyed, hinting at the possiblity of rain. Was that a drop just now? Alas, only the condensate from the air conditioners overhead. Wewake from siesta to perennial azure.

El Parque de María Luisa

Between the Rio Guadalquivir and the Plaza de España lies El Parque de María Luisa, a multi-faceted green jewel in a much-paved city. Among the eucalyptus, palm and jacaranda trees I am Lilliputian, dwarfed by their height and girth. The colossal flora are emphemera of a different era, Sevilla´s breath, held in times of crisis and carefully exhaled in times of rebirth.



Originally, the gardens of the palace of San Telmo, patron saint of mariners, the Duchess of Bourbon gave them to Sevilla. They sat neglected until the city incorporated them into the grand setting for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition--a showcase for the pavilions of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

Fortunes rise and fall. The 1929 Ibero-American Exposition failed to generate the hoped-for economic boost for Spain and Portugal, opening as the stock market crashed. Revolutions and civil wars sent the park, once Sevilla´s only public park, into neglect again. It rises once more, a splendid setting for the museums that now occupy the former pavilions of the 1929 expostion.









A small gem emerges from the green, glimpses of azure and terracotta teasing through the shrubs. The tiled pool sits quietly among the eucalyptus, their leaves floating serenely on the water´s surface.





On a raised backdrop, a ceramic relief shows two caravels, their sails filled with wind. This small, outdoor room honors Los Hermanos Álvarez Quintero, Serafín and Joaquín, beloved writers of plays, dramas, and the quintessential zarzuela. Their works, extremely popular in the early twentieth century, a rebirth of Spanish theatre.



A small banner floats across the top of the relief, "Un mismo aliento impulsa las dos velas...."



A single breath pushes two ships....

In El Parque de María Luisa, I hear Spain, its breath soughing through the jacarandas, pushing this rebirth of its Andalusian heritage.