Music and Jazz : Flamenco Guitarist Paco Pena Delivers a Dazzling Recital

COSTA MESA —  Guitarist Paco Pena is usually labeled a traditionalist, and probably fairly so, in this world of rapidly mutating Flamenco Lite hybrids. But he is also an imaginative innovator and individualist, as he demonstrated again Friday at the Fine Arts Recital Hall of Orange Coast College.

If there is any major element of fusion in Pena’s style, it is with the clarity, complexity and finesse of the classical guitar. He began his opening Granainas, for example, with supple, fluttering tremolo rather than a burst of attitude-establishing rasqueado strumming.

Unlike some of his more primitive colleagues, he appreciates the value of melody and architecture. His Peteneras grew as an eloquent song-and-variations with all the nobility, variety and structural integrity of a passacaglia.

Pena utilizes folk-melodies in unusual ways. He can put them out front, such as in the two Guajiras he played, but he also smuggles allusive hints into unlikely places, such as the way the ancient “Tres Moricas M’enamoran” slipped into the bass line at the beginning of his Malaguenas.

Throughout the evening, the guitarist showed a penchant for slow, deceptive, but ultimately organic introductions. The dark brooding from which he launched his Alegrias de Cordoba, surprising as it was, provided a substantial base for his frequent shifts in mode.

He also proved fond of elaborate cross-meter games, always letting the apparent chaos reveal the underlying order at the psychologically apt moment.

However wildly Pena’s imagination expands the traditional paradigms, his technique can support the fantasy. Besides all the fire and flash expected, he commands an astounding wealth of colors, including astonishingly feathery rasqueado as well as the prototypical machine-gun riffs.

About the only things that did not work optimally Friday were his Seguiriyas. The frequent pauses and odd little chromatic adventures that led nowhere suggested simply lack of inspiration, rather than the shattering pain characteristic of the form.

Pena was scheduled to be at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena on Saturday, returning to Orange Coast on Sunday.