Two unrepeatable Barcelonans, born the same year exactly a century ago and destined to achieve musical excellence and establish friendships, off and on stage. Alicia de Larrocha and Victoria de los Ángeles star at the Palau Robert – until January 7 – in one of the most revealing and attractive exhibitions of cultural heritage. Its centenary invites the human and artistic approach of two women who coincided in many recitals, the first at Hunter College in New York, in 1971, although three decades earlier they had already recorded together.
“How I would have liked to be at the concert today! With these flowers goes my great affection and that eternal admiration for your art and willpower. “Never give up,” the soprano writes to the pianist in New York. This letter from 1989 in a Le Méridien notebook gives rise to the title of That Eternal Admiration curated by the journalist and musicologist Pep Gorgori with editing by the stage director Rafael R. Villalobos, who even includes a conceptual room in which to recreate the tours with part of a plane from the sixties (from a scrapyard in Toulouse). All this with the complicity of the curators of the respective legacies: Alicia Torra, daughter of De Larrocha and guarantor of her documentary collection, and Helena Mora, daughter-in-law of the soprano and president of her Foundation.
Audios, documentaries (Brava, Victoria! and Alicia’s Hands), photographs, home movies, everyday objects, dresses or instruments, like one of Alicia’s pianos, covered with a blanket so as not to disturb the neighbors. The exhibition begins with the surround sound of Victoria’s voice and Alicia’s piano at her house, rehearsing Black Songs by Montsalvatge. They had met in 1941, when the soprano won the Radio Barcelona award and learned of a pianist her age, although we start from the beginning of their careers, with images of little Alicia in her recital debut, without reaching the pedals. , the little dress she wore when she was five or six years old, or the scores from her first concert, at the Expo of ’29.
Victoria’s notes from the Conservatori del Liceu are on display, where she studied guitar for three years and singing for three years: those from 1937-38, in the middle of the war, in Catalan; the following ones already in Spanish. Josep Alemanya would later have him play the flute in the ancient ensemble Ars Musicae that he founded in the 1930s…
The international projection of both could fill entire walls. A poster for an Alice concert in Nice stands out, which reproduces a painting by Marc Chagall that the painter himself dedicated to her! In the United States, both were goddesses… Villalobos recreates Victoria’s dressing room, with jewelry, lipstick, a letter from the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf remembering the old days, the stocking and her personal diaries: “New York, 1954… she has come Salvador Dalí and I found him nice even despite his mustache and his wife.” Alicia’s studio also appears wallpapered with photos dedicated by colleagues… such as Casals or Rubinstein, who already in 1932 wrote to her: “As a reminder of the deep emotion that her great talent has caused me.”
Personal and family life deserve their own space, with Super 8 filming that both did. Victoria takes her mother on her tour (from UB cleaning lady to Bayreuth Festival spectator), or buys dolls for Ali, the pianist’s daughter.
In a simulated recording studio, Alicia’s four Grammys face each other with the Gold Record that Victoria earned for the 5 million copies of La bohème, the best-selling recording of an entire opera in history. And 50 cassettes are exhibited that Joan Torra, Alicia’s husband and fan, and also an excellent pianist, collected from his wife’s concerts. “She asked friends from all over the world to record her discreetly, and she accumulated 500,” says Gorgori. “That gave me the idea of ??combining three of his studio albums with the same tracks taken from the cassettes.” For example, The Dance of Terror (from Falla’s El amor brujo), played as a tip with the audience already unleashed, which underlines the live brilliance of this key pianist in the musical history of the 20th century.
