Peralada lived yesterday a night of authentic Catalan thanks to a beautiful recital of songs and opera arias. The public of the Empordà festival attended the reincarnation of Victoria de los Ángeles in the church of El Carme –and with the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, in the front row. The incomparable Barcelona soprano whose birth is celebrating the centenary took shape in another great figure of singing, Núria Rial from Manresa, born half a century later.
And it was one of the peak moments of the current musical course. For how the transmission of an extraordinary school of singing made in Catalonia was reflected. Well, at times, closing your eyes, it was not difficult to imagine Victoria singing from beyond. With her natural imposition, her pure and luminous timbre that transmits candor and Mediterranean lyricism, Núria Rial evoked the always honest and warm expression of the historic soprano... to the point of bringing the more than 200 spectators almost to tears. mocked a hot August sunset.
The program had been designed jointly with the celebrated Basque pianist Rubén Fernández Aguirre, who has a history as patron of the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation and collaborated with its president, Helena Mora, in concerts to benefit Down syndrome before the Alejandro, Victoria's youngest son, passed away in 2019.
Aguirre and Rial starred in a cosmic journey through that other dimension in which immeasurable artists await us. His was a program linked to that artist who disappeared in 2005, at the age of 81, who was both an indisputable diva of opera – la Scala exalted her along with Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi – as one of the most famous liederistas of his generation. And Rial and Aguirre wanted to reproduce in this concert entitled Cantar del alma, like the well-known theme by Frederic Mompou with which she began, in a carbon copy of her programs. Because she built them in a particular way that inspired other greats of the lyrical scene such as Barbara Hendricks and René Fleming. Victoria always started with an old song, followed by blocks of German lied and others by mélodie française, to end with Spanish and Catalan songs. And so she was made in Peralada.
That Cantar del alma, which was one of the hits in his repertoire, composed by one of his great friends –Mompou, Montsalvatge...–, was in Rial's voice a declaration of intent: the link with the land, the Mediterranean that permeates the singing of both artists even separated by half a century. And it was followed, yes, by a block of baroque arias from the 17th century: Les fêtes vénitiennes by Campra, Orotea by Cesti and Le Violette by Pirro e Demetria, by Scarlatti. And the vocal connection seemed total.
It was the musicologist Oriol Pérez Treviño who would remember in the corridors of the church, during the intermission, that not in vain Victoria began making early music with Ars Musicae, the group founded by Josep María Lamaña in the fifties and later directed by Enric Gispert ... who would later found the Capella de Música de Santa Maria del Mar, where Rial would be the one who would start in ancient music. Both share that poetic approach to the text that the baroque of recitatives gives, more than that of coloraturas.
The first part continued with lieder by Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms, to leave the audience disarmed with Kaddish, from Ravel's Deux mélodies hébraiques...
The second did not start with a hit from Victoria's, but precisely with a tribute, that of the composer Bernat Vivancos, titled Victoria, based on a verse by the soprano herself, and with Rial strumming the piano strings. And as Núria Rial previously confessed, it was in the Spanish and Catalan pieces where she was heard fully identified with her referential Victoria.
Singing La maja by Goya and El tra-la-lá and dotting by Granados, the time machine started up. The traditional Catalan Mariagneta, by García Morante, who accompanied her so much on piano while she was alive, is beautiful. Rial also sang Vocalise a Victoria, a piece by Mompou that curiously never reached the hands of the soprano herself. And she began a habanera of the Five Black Songs of Montsalvatge... followed by the great moment of the evening: I don't want your hazelnuts, by Guridi. The goodbye was with Toldrà and his Cançó de comiat, to end in the encores with A Chloris de Hahn. Among the audience were composers, Vivancos himself, Alberto García de Mestres and Marc Timón, and singers like David Alegret. The profession was aware of the historical moment... And it was.
