Federico García Lorca, beloved poet, musician, dramatist and inspiration to a galaxy of artists – Ginsberg, Shostakovich, the Pogues, Leonard Cohen and Carlos Saura among them – is honoured in this latest piece by the London/Córdoba-based Spanish guitar virtuoso Paco Peña and his close band of nine musicians and dancers.
The main man is sitting easy, guitar held high, in the short taster recital that opens the evening: silvery solos with flamenco flashing by the master's side. Though performed with grace by all three, it has an unexpected warmup feel – a personal tribute to Lorca, perhaps, but disconnected from the main work, Patrias (Homelands), to come.
Patrias engages with the Edinburgh international festival's war-history theme over the next 90 minutes, with music, song and dance recalling Lorca's vibrant poetic genius, as well as his untimely death by firing squad at the beginning of the Spanish civil war in 1936.
Guitars purr and slap with immaculate precision through the evening. The flamenco couple attach alternate solos and duets to the melodies with flick-head speed. The singers, José Angel Carmona and Gema Jiménez, bring powerful creature calls to the mix.
At its best, Patrias gathers the performers into sparse, village-square intimacy, all eyes intent on synchronising the vivid rhythms of hands, feet and drum as they become one body of sound. But the work itself suffers identity crises. To create a bigger narrative about war and death, layers of artifice are added to the musical core, interrupting the sense of freestyling pleasure. Hammy musical theatre direction, sporadic spoken texts around Lorca and the war, and archive film (of goats and trees morphing into running soldiers and civilians) reduce the impact of the show.
El duende, described by Lorca as a mysterious dark power, is said to join flamenco performers and audiences in an elemental spirit of emotion and authenticity. Unfortunately, this delicate nexus fails to mature here.
• Clap hands for Paco Peña's flamenco dancers – in pictures
