Peralada experienced a night of authentic Catalanness yesterday thanks to a beautiful recital of songs and opera arias. The audience of the Empordà festival attended the carme church – and with the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, in the front row – the reincarnation of Victòria dels Àngels. The incomparable soprano from Barcelona, ??whose birth is 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 key moments of the current musical year. For how the transmission of an extraordinary school of singing made in Catalonia was reflected. At times, closing my eyes, it was easy to imagine Victoria singing from the beyond. With her natural setting, her pure and luminous timbre that conveys Mediterranean candor and lyricism, Núria Rial evoked the always honest and warm expression of the historic soprano… to the point of bringing almost to tears the more than 200 spectators who, sheltered in the church, they mocked a hot August evening.
The program had been designed together with the celebrated Basque pianist Rubén Fernández Aguirre, who has a career as patron of the Victòria dels Àngels Foundation and collaborated with its president, Helena Mora, in concerts to benefit Down Syndrome , before Álex, Victoria’s youngest son, died in 2019.
Aguirre and Rial starred in a cosmic journey through this other dimension where immeasurable artists await us. Hers was a program linked to the artist who disappeared in 2005, at the age of 81, who was both an undisputed diva of opera – the Hall named her together with Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi – and one of the most famous liederistas of their generation. And Rial and Aguirre wanted to reproduce in this concert entitled Cantar del alma, like the well-known theme of Frederic Mompou with which he started, a copy of his programs. Because he built them in a way that inspired other greats of the lyric scene such as Barbara Hendricks and René Fleming. Victòria always started with an old song, followed by blocks of German lied and others of mélodie française, to finish with Spanish and Catalan songs. And so it was done in Peralada.
This Cantar del alma which was one of the hits in his repertoire, composed by one of his great friends – Mompou, Montsalvatge…– meant in Rial’s voice a statement of intentions: the link with the land, the Mediterranean that permeates the singing of the two artists, despite being separated by half a century. And yes, a block of baroque arias from the 17th century followed: 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 remind the corridors of the church, during the intermission, that it was not for nothing that Victoria started playing early music with Ars Musicae, the group founded by Josep María Lamaña in the fifties and that later directed by Enric Gispert… who would later found the Capella de Música de Santa Maria del Mar, where Rial would be initiated into early music. Both share this poetic approach to the text that gives the baroque of recitatives, 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 hebraiques…
The second didn’t start with a hit from Victòria, but rather with a tribute, that of the composer Bernat Vivancos, entitled Victòria, based on a verse by the soprano herself, and with Rial tearing the piano strings. And as Rial herself previously confessed, it was in the Spanish and Catalan pieces that she felt fully identified with her referential Victoria.
Singing La maja de Goya and El Tra-lalá y el punteado de Granados, the time machine started. Beautiful traditional Catalan Mariagneta, by García Morante, who accompanied her on the piano during her lifetime. Rial also sang Vocalise a Victoria, a piece by Mompou that never reached the hands of the soprano, curiously enough. And he began a havanera of Montsalvatge’s Cinco canciones negras… followed by the big moment of the evening: No quiero tus avellanas, by Guridi. The farewell was with Toldrà and his Farewell Song, to finish in the encores with A Chloris by Hahn. Among the audience were composers – Vivancos himself, Alberto García de Mestres and Marc Timón, and singers such as David Alegret. The profession was aware of the historic moment… And it was.
