The Empordà night of music would start on Saturday in the Espai Ter de Torroella de Montgrí with the laconic tinkling of a bell. The Agrupación Señor Serrano was inaugurating a new edition of the festival – the 42nd now – with its particular theatrical project on the music of Joan Cererols (Martorell, 1618-Montserrat Abbey, 1680).
An adventure co-produced by the Teatro de la Abadía and the Real de Madrid, which combines the masses of the great goldsmith of polyphonies, the Missa de Batalla and the Missa pro Defunctis, with images that evoke everything from the Amazonian conquests to the current exploitation from the coltan mines, or from the dissection of the body in search of the mistress to the poems created by the AI. Or, watch out, a finale with the crackling of popcorn from four botafumeiros that hang from the top of the stage.
The unmistakable smell of crispetes invaded the entire room to the surprise of the spectators, who could not believe the theatrical reinterpretation of the Missa de Batalla... a work inspired by the parody-mass by the French Renaissance composer Clément Janequin, La Guerre ou La Battle of Marignan. The work was composed as a victorious celebration of the Spanish military unity in the Kingdom of Naples. Carlos II ordered in 1683 that it be sung in all his domains to honor the memory of soldiers killed in combat...
Meanwhile, the members of the choir continued to concentrate on serving this splendid baroque work with total fidelity and style, one of the few that are preserved in Cererols, since a large part was destroyed in the fire of 1811 in Montserrat. It was in the thirties of the last century when the compositions that are preserved by Cererols were published, those that were rescued here and there.
The proposal came to Torroella with a plus that, yes, raised the spirit of the attendees: the participation of Cor Cererols, specialized in this so-called Catalan Monteverdi who, unlike his contemporary in Venice, did not have it so easy from Montserrat to surrendering to the adornment, to the excess and the audacity that meant moving from the madrigal to the opera.
Extinción , which is the title of the show, was presented to the public in the form of a performative musical poem. Àlex Serrano and Pau Palacios, brains of this tracksuit aesthetic Group, resort to their usual creative strategy: filming animated still lifes and slight stagings in situ that they project in real time on a large screen.
The actor Marcel Borràs, for example, appears among tropical plants and puts on the armor of the conqueror Francisco de Orellana to supposedly descend with a Spanish ship through the Peruvian Amazon... Immediately afterwards what appears is a miner in the middle of the mine collapse , and a hand searches through the earth until it finds a state-of-the-art mobile.
These temporal transpositions were, in fact, the least of it. What worried the public was the scene of the anatomical dissection in which Carlota Grau, Àlex Serrano, David Muñiz and Borràs himself participate in the extraction... of a coltan stone.
It was a success that the theatrical group wanted to leave room for music –which really surprises for its beauty in the hands of Cor Cererols, masterfully directed by Marc Díaz– but in the second part, with the Missa de Batalla, the plot drift was so shocking and humorous that the public could not be abstracted and concentrated with the music.
A mobile that rises with both hands like a consecrated host: a human getting fat until he looks like a giant popcorn, like the one projected on the screen; the botafumeiros from the ceiling cooking them and expelling them as if the whole stage were a microwave... The occurrences of the Señor Serrano caused a general debauchery and, despite the fact that more than one person later stated that they would have preferred to concentrate on the wonderful sound, the The reaction from the public was very hot. Applause, whistles, cheers and other signs of celebration marked the inauguration of the festival in Torroella.
