23/07/2008
On Saturday 26th July, the Santa María Cathedral Foundation is
beginning a series of chamber music concerts under the title ‘Open for
concerts’. This cultural programme will include regular concerts held
at the Cathedral, starting next Saturday with a performance by Coro
Hondore. Free entry.
The ‘Music in the portico. Open for concerts’ programme is part of the
Foundation’s aim to promote the Cathedral as the real space for
knowledge it’s becoming, and particularly the portico following its
recent restoration. Furthermore, it aims to maintain the active
presence of the Cathedral in the city’s Historic Quarter. The programme
will be divided into various parallel cycles, so that in any given
month there might be performances of ancient music, modern music and
new trends, as well as other genres.
This programme will begin
next Saturday 26th July with a performance by Coro Hondore. Led by
Jesús María Unanue with piano accompaniment by Ana Belén García, the
choir will perform a programme entitled ‘Nature and poetry’ with pieces
for choir and piano by Fauré, Lauridsen, Ravel, Holman and Whitacre,
and texts by Victor Hugo, Rilke, Shakespeare, Neruda and Octavio Paz.
The Coro Hondore was founded at the end of 1996 in response to the
concerns of a group of friends and members of different choral groups
in Guipúzcoa who wanted to explore the possibilities of choral singing
in greater depth. Thanks to its commitment to quality, Hondore has been
invited to take part in prestigious festivals, including the San
Sebastian Ancient Music Fortnight.broad and varied, encompassing
different styles and periods, although it specialises in religious
music.
The next concert in the series will be by the group Akusma, a
production that combines light and sound with a selection of acousmatic
pieces from the international scene. The performance will be taking
place on the 2nd August, and a special sound system will be set up to
control up to 12 sound projection channels. Ignacio Monterrubio is
responsible for the transmission of sound and Daniel Ibisate is in
charge of the light design.
On the 16th August, the Cathedral’s portico will become the venue for a
performance by Quinteto Oblivion, a group that features Inés de Madrazo
and Nora Bolinaga on violin, María José Ros (viola), Estibaliz Oraá
(cello) and Laura de la Hoz (double bass). They will perform pieces by
Toldrá and Dvorak.
The ‘Open for concerts’ season will continue on Saturday 23rd with
Quinteto Medea. These five students of the violin, viola, clarinet and
cello from the Basque Music Conservatory (Musikene) have extensive
experience as solo performers and in chamber groups.
Alongside this programme, on Tuesday 29th July the portico will be the
venue for the lecture entitled ‘The sound of architecture: musical
representation of Aragon Mudejar’ by the Vice Chancellor of the
University of Zaragoza José Ramón Beltrán. The lecture will be
accompanied by a concert for violin, cello, flute and percussion, which
will translate the study carried out by Beltrán on the Mudejar towers
of Aragon into sound.
Beltrán holds a PhD in Physics and is a lecturer of Electroacoustics at
the Telecommunications Engineering College in the University of
Zaragoza. He is researches technology applied to sound. His work
focuses on listening to a monument and translating its geometry into
music. All events will be taking place in the Cathedral portico at 8
p.m. Given the limited capacity of the venue, invitations can be
collected at the entrance to the portico (Fray Zacarías Martínez)
before the concert.